Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is a virus that attacks the body’s immune system. If HIV is not treated, it can lead to Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). There is currently no cure for HIV, but with proper medical care, it can be controlled, and people can still live long, healthy lives.
HIV infections came from chimpanzees in Central Africa. The chimpanzee version of the virus (called simian immunodeficiency virus, or SIV) was probably passed to humans when humans hunted these chimpanzees for meat and came into contact with their infected blood. Studies show that HIV may have jumped from chimpanzees to humans as far back as the late 1800s. Over the decades, HIV slowly spread across Africa and into other parts of the world. We know that the The virus has existed in the United States since at least the mid-to-late-1970s.
Symptoms of HIV include fever, chills, rash, night sweats, muscle aches, sore throat, fatigue, swollen lymph nodes, and mouth ulcers. AIDS is the most severe phase of an HIV infection. People receive an AIDS diagnosis when their CD4 cell count drops below 200 cells/mm or if they develop certain opportunistic infections. People with AIDS have severely significantly damaged immune systems, making them susceptible to many severe illnesses, called opportunistic infections. Without treatment, people with AIDS typically survive about three years.
In the early 1980s during During the emerging AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s, Dr. Ruth Kirschstein, who worked for many years in biologics but was at this time was the Director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), in the face of political opposition, helped to mobilize the National Institutes of Health (NIH) efforts to study the virus and develop and test drugs to combat this new public health threat in spite of political opposition.
HIV Poster from the Being Alive organization in Los Angeles, California, late 20th century.
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Both the NIH and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were and still are actively involved in research and regulation to prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS. In addition to individual antiretroviral drugs, preventive medications, fixed dose combination drugs, and monoclonal antibodies have revolutionized the fight against the AIDS epidemic. In the past 30 years, the FDA has approved 32 antiretroviral drugs, one pharmacokinetic enhancer, and 21 fixed dose combinations to treat HIV/AIDS patients. Thanks to these therapeutic advancements life expectancy for AIDS patients has increased dramatically. Early research began at the NIH in the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). As the HIV pandemic spread and given the fact that so many physiological systems and organs were involved in HIV/AIDS infections, increased coordination across the NIH campus was needed. The Office of AIDS Research (OAR) was established in1988 for this purpose and it still exists today.
