That’s right. Fifty years — and that estimate is on the low end. And here you thought AIDS was "only" twenty-five years old.
In 1986, Dr. A.J. Nahmias, writing in the journal Lancet, reported on testing that had been done on blood samples taken during a 1959 malaria study in Kinshasa, in what was then the Belgian Congo. When those preserved samples were tested in 1986, one sample tested positive for the HIV virus. Other stored blood samples from Central Africans taken in 1960’s and 1970’s tested positive as well.
I have more thoughts on World AIDS Day my post AIDS, Fifty Years Later. And you can read more about how AIDS has impacted the gay communities in America in Opportunistic Infections. There is a lot of misinformation about where AIDS came from -- misinformation that is all too often used against the gay community. I hope these articles can clear some of that up.