Forty years ago, this very month in California, the first man started dying of a strange illness that would ultimately be diagnosed as AIDS.

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It would go on to take the lives of millions of people all across the world. Here’s a look at how the disease was discovered and how it’s being combated.

In June 1981, epidemiologists in the United States had reported five occurrences of an uncommon kind of pneumonia in homosexual men in California, with some of them dying. Others had discovered unusual forms of skin cancer.

It was the earliest warning concerning the still-unnamed and unknown, now Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).

Later in the year, doctors discovered “opportunistic infections” among injected drug users, as well as haemophiliacs and Haitian residents in the United States.

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In 1982, the term AIDS was coined for the first time.

Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Jean-Claude Chermann, working under Luc Montagnier, detected the virus that “might be” responsible for AIDS in January 1983. LAV is the name given to it, for the time being.

Robert Gallo, an American expert, was reported to have discovered the “probable” cause of AIDS, the retrovirus HTLV-III, the subsequent year after that.

The two viruses were discovered to be identical, and the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, was formally named in May 1986.

In 2008, Barre-Sinoussi and Montagnier were awarded the Nobel Prize for their finding.

The first anti-retroviral medication, known as AZT, was approved in the United States in March 1987. It was both costly and had side effects.

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To increase awareness, the World Health Organization (WHO) proclaimed December 1, 1988 as the inaugural World AIDS Day. The number of AIDS cases globally was expected to reach above 150,000 by June of the following year.

In October 1985, American actor Rock Hudson became the first high-profile AIDS victim. Other celebrities who succumbed to the condition include Freddie Mercury (November 1991), the lead vocalist of Queen, and Rudolf Nureyev, the famed Russian dancer and choreographer (January 1993).

AIDS then became the top cause of death among Americans aged 25 to 44 in 1994.

A new class of medications heralded the beginning of anti-retroviral therapy combinations.

Tri-therapies would be the first successful HIV treatments, albeit they were never a cure but were still expensive.

The number of AIDS fatalities in the United States started to decrease in 1996.

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According to a report issued by WHO and the Joint United Nations Programme on AIDS (UNAIDS) in November 1999, 50 million individuals had been infected with HIV since it first surfaced, with 16 million of them succumbing to it.

With 12.2 million cases, Africa had to be the worst-affected continent.

The then-President George W. Bush of the United States announced the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, in February 2003 to battle the transmission of AIDS in 15 of Africa’s and the Caribbean’s hardest-hit areas.

PEPFAR began with a $15 billion budget for the first five years and had contributed $70 billion to the AIDS response by 2018.

It was revealed that the first HIV-positive patient had been healed. The “Berlin Patient,” eventually identified as American Timothy Brown, had two bone marrow transplants carrying a gene mutation that inhibited HIV from targeting host cells.

To cure his leukaemia, he had to undergo complete body irradiation, and he nearly died during the procedure.

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UNAIDS announced that for the first time ever, more than half of the world’s HIV-positive people were getting antiretroviral therapy.

After getting a stem cell transplant with the same mutation as in the Berlin case, a second patient with prolonged HIV suppression had been recorded.

The patient’s viral load had stayed undetected for 19 months and counting, according to regular testing.

Success in developing an anti-Covid vaccine in 2020 raised expectations that a breakthrough in developing an HIV vaccine is on the way.

Moderna stated in January that it has begun phase one clinical trials utilizing their messenger RNA technology for flu and HIV vaccinations.

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According to UNAIDS’ most recent yearly data for 2020, there are 37.6 million persons living with HIV worldwide. Since the outbreak, 34.7 million people have died from AIDS-related diseases.