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 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 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 the emerging AIDS epidemic, 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.
