Medicine: The Deadly Spread of AIDS

Homosexuals, Haitians and hemophiliacs fall victim

It began suddenly, in the autumn of 1979. Young homosexual men with a history of promiscuity started showing up at the medical clinics of New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco with a bizarre array of ailments. Some had Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a deadly disease rarely seen except in drug-weakened cancer and transplant patients. Others bore the purplish skin lesions of Kaposi's sarcoma, a cancer that is usually confined to elderly men of Mediterranean extraction and young males in Equatorial Africa. Still others had developed strange...

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