CDC Issued First Report Of AIDS 30 Years Ago

The Center for Disease Control issued the first official notice of the disease that would become known as AIDS 30 years ago on June 5.

The time was 1981 and San Francisco's Castro District was ground zero. The AIDS epidemic swept in and changed lives.

Diane Havlir heads the HIV/AIDS program at San Francisco General Hospital and she recalled what it was like in the early 1980s when no one knew why young men were dying.

“What I saw was tremendous suffering, tremendous despair, death,” Havlir said. “There wasn't a lot of time to reflect on what this mean because one man after the next was coming in to our emergency room and couldn't breathe -- had a new type of pneumonia -- and we needed to respond. ”

The halls of San Francisco General Hospital was where she witnessed the courage and compassion of the many AIDS patients who died in the prime of their lives.

Thanks to medical advances Stephen Williams was not one of them.

The 44-year-old was diagnosed with HIV in 1999. He now counsels newly diagnosed HIV patients.

“The thing i try to say all the time is you have to take your medication,” Williams said. “If you don't you become resistant and it doesn't work all the time.”

In the past 30 years, the disease has moved from a death sentence to a chronic, treatable condition, but doctors stress the HIV epidemic isn't over.

“We know that HIV infection unfortunately is expanding,” said University of California, San Francisco clinical fellow in the HIV/AIDS division. “For each new person we're putting on therapy, more than one person is getting HIV infection.

Remaining challenges include how to expand therapies to more people and finding a cure.

Mervyn Silverman, formerly of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, said finding a vaccine is at least 10 years away but researchers have made more strides in HIV/AIDS than any other disease in reported history.

And Stephen Williams said those strides mean a bright future for him.

The centers for disease control issued the first official notice of the disease that would become known as "aids" 30 years ago today.