Forty years ago today, April 23, 1984, President Ronald Reagan's secretary of health and human services, Margaret Heckler, announced the discovery of the virus responsible for causing AIDS.
She also announced a vaccine might be coming soon. She would be woefully wrong on that second count.
On June 5, 1981, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's weekly Morbidity and Mortality Report noted an unusual cluster of a particular lung condition found in five previously healthy gay men in Los Angeles.
Over the following months, additional cases were found in men in other cities around the U.S., along with other ailments typically found in patients whose immunology has been suppressed.
By August 1982, the disease had been found to spread rapidly among gay men, hemophiliacs, immigrants from Haiti and users of intravenous drugs. The CDC began referring to it as “the 4H disease” — for homosexuals, heroin users, hemophiliacs and Haitians — but finally settled on Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, or AIDS.
The race was on to determine what infectious agent caused AIDS.
In 1983, a team at the Pasteur Institute in Paris led by Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi discovered HIV-1, a retrovirus that affected some human white blood cells — T-cells, which play a role in the immune system — but not others. They called their discovery a Lymphadenopathy- Associated Virus.
A year later, a team of scientists led by Robert Gallo at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, isolated a retrovirus in a group of 48 AIDS patients and found a way to produce that retrovirus in a laboratory, allowing for more extensive study. Gallo called the new retro virus HTLV-III, for Human T-Lymphotropic Virus.
It was then that Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler announced the virus responsible for the AIDS epidemic had been found. She would later admit that promising a vaccine was a serious miscalculation on her part.
Montagnier's group was later able to show that the two viruses were different but related. In 1986, LAV and HTLV-III were renamed Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV.
In 1991, Gallo admitted the retrovirus he had claimed to discover was, in fact, a virus sent to him by the French team the year before. It was also alleged that Gallo had falsified some of his data to beat the French team and claim the credit for discovering the retrovirus. Much of this drama was portrayed in the 1993 made-for-TV movie “And the Band Played On.”
Nevertheless, Gallo has continued to work on HIV test kits, HIV/AIDS treatment strategies and pursuing a vaccine.
An HIV Rapid Test Kit
In 2008, Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology for their work in isolating the HIV virus. Montagnier said he was “surprised” Gallo was excluded from the Nobel Prize. “It was important to prove that HIV was the cause of AIDS,” Montagnier told reporters. “Gallo had a very important role in that. I'm very sorry for Robert Gallo.”
There is still no vaccine for HIV. With lifelong treatment with medicine to suppress the virus and its effects, however, patients can expect to live a long life. In addition, an HIV-positive patient who is being treated is of much lower risk of transmitting HIV.
The number of new HIV infections in the U.S. has declined about 12% over the past four years to about 30,000 a year. The number of HIV-positive patients who die from AIDS has declined.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates that 13% of people in the U.S. who have HIV don't know and haven't been tested.
This edition of Further Review was adapted for the web by Zak Curley.
