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Previous Volume 354:2414-2417 June 8, 2006 Number 23 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

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On June 5, 1981, when the Centers for Disease Control reported five cases of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia in young homosexual men in Los Angeles,¹ few suspected it heralded a pandemic of AIDS. In 1983, a retrovirus (later named the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV) was isolated from a patient with AIDS. In the 25 years since the first report, more than 65 million persons have been infected with HIV, and more than 25 million have died of AIDS. Worldwide, more than 40 percent of new infections among adults are in young people 15 to 24 years of age.²

Ninety-five percent . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Source Information

Dr. Merson is a professor at the Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, Conn., and director of Yale's Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS.

An interview with Dr. Merson is available at www.nejm.org.

An interactive AIDS timeline is available with the full text of this article at www.nejm.org.

This article has been cited by other articles:

• HARRIS, A., BOLUS, N. E (2008). HIV/AIDS: An update. radtech 79: 243-252 [Abstract] [Full Text]