Thirty years of HIV/AIDS and related oral manifestations and management.

153 The early 1980s brought the explosion of information availability and the emergence of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) infection. Advances in information technology enabled humans to get access to information instantly. On June 5, 1981, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published a rare type of pneumonia (pneumocystis carinii) in 5 previously healthy homosexual men in Los Angeles.1 On the other side of the world, in Uganda, the emergence of a severe wasting syndrome locally known as “slim disease” was reported. What was originally perceived as a rumor turned to a stigma, fear, an epidemic and eventually a tragedy. The rare reported cases with respiratory diseases in Los Angeles were later marked as the beginning of the HIV epidemic. Slim disease was soon found to be associated with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), an advanced stage of HIV infection. In 1984, LAV virus was discovered in France, and a year later HTLV III was isolated in the U.S. Both viruses were later found to be the same virus and renamed HIV. In 1999, HIV was found to be a variation of the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV) found in a chimpanzee species in West Africa.