The date that officially marks the beginning of the AIDS pandemic is June 5, 1981, when five suspected cases of pulmonary pneumocystosis - a very rare type of pneumonia - were reported to the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) in homosexual men.
On 4 July of the same year, the CDC reported the death of a group of young men in New York and California due to aggressive forms of Kaposi's sarcoma, a rather rare skin cancer, which generally develops elderly subjects with an immune system weakened. It therefore appears evident that the first cases of AIDS mainly affect homosexuals and drug addicts. However, over time the numbers are increasing and hemophiliacs, women and children are also added.
A year later the term AIDS ( Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or, in English, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome ) is introduced to describe the discovered disease more correctly. In 1983, researchers finally succeeded in isolating the human immunodeficiency virus ( HIV, Human Immunodeficiency Virus ), which we now know as the AIDS causative agent.
