Man has AIDS in 1950s

[Dave Wilton]

I posted the original query here since I did not have faith that those 
on alt.folklore.urban would come up with authoritative information. I 
was wrong; they came through with flying colors. Here is a summary of 
what the afu crowd came up with:

> In article <chiparmD4LHt4.Mo0 at netcom.com>,
> Chip Armstrong <chiparm at netcom.com> wrote:
>
>It begins in the 1950s (or maybe 1960s) when a man has some mysterious 
>illness and the doctors have absolutely no idea what's wrong with him. 
>Slowly the man wastes away and dies, and blood and tissue samples
>are stored away...(snip)...
>   FF to the early 1980s. ...(snip)...  blood and tissue samples (or 
>whatever it was they saved) are pulled from deep storage and tested, 
>and it is found that the man from the 1950s had the AIDS virus.


Barbara Hamel, ag028 at freenet.carleton.ca supplied the conclusive proof 
that this one is true. The original citation appears to be the 7 July 
1990 edition of The Lancet. A 25-year old Manchester (UK) sailor died in 
1959 of what would now be called various AIDs-related diseases. The case 
was originally written up in The Lancet in 1960 as an anomaly. In 1983 
doctors at the Univ. of Manchester, remembering the case, suspected 
AIDS, but techniques to test the samples were not available until 1989.

Other cases appear to exist. The 24 July 1990 NY Times article that 
Barbara posted mentioned other cases from the 1960s. It also mentioned 
the testing of a Zairian blood sample from 1959 that was HIV-positive, 
but the fate of the anonymous donor is unknown.

Gerald A. Belton, gbelton at rs4.tcs.tulane.edu cited an article by D. 
Huminer, J.B. Rosenfeld, and S.D. Pitlik titled "AIDS in the pre-AIDS 
era." (Sorry, I don't understand Medline nomenclature and could not 
decipher what journal it was in--dw) These researchers conducted a 
search of the medical literature published since 1950 finding 19 cases 
of probable AIDS reported before the start of the current epidemic. The 
reports originated from North America, Western Europe, Africa, and the 
Middle East. The researchers concluded that unrecognized cases of AIDS 
have occurred sporadically in the pre-AIDS era.

Olav Hungnes, olav.hungnes at embnet.uio.no, of the National Institute 
of Public Health Oslo, Norway reports of a Norwegian sailor, his wife, 
and child who all died of AIDS in 1976, confirmed through subsequent 
tests.

Others have reported a case of a St. Louis (US) male prostitute who died 
in various years in the 1950s and 1960s, but no one has provided 
documentation beyond a reference to "The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS," 
which does not qualify as an original source.

So chalk this one up as *true.* In addition, since there are numerous 
probable cases, some may not consider it to be a urban legend.

--Dave Wilton
  dwilton at ix.netcom.com