25 years ago Virus AIDS was first discovered

Since that time AIDS has killed 25 million people. 38.6 million people are living now with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, San Francisco Chronicle reports.

Photo: 25 years ago Virus AIDS was first discovered

Amid the initial excitement of medical researchers on the trail of a new disease, no one knew that 250,000 gay men in the United States were already infected with HIV, the AP reports.

A disease that first emerged among marginalized groups - homosexual men, prostitutes and injection-drug users - AIDS exploited social stigma wherever it emerged. Instead of sympathy, AIDS often aroused contempt; instead of compassionate care, it encouraged fear and neglect.

For scientists who have pursued in our respective ways the labyrinthine course of the international AIDS pandemic, these years have been an extraordinarily humbling journey. From a time when we wondered if we would ever see a hundred, a thousand, a million people infected with HIV/AIDS, we now are near the 70 million mark of officially infected people, worldwide. More than 25 million of them have died, and 14 million others have been orphaned.

They procreate by first making a single copy of themselves. They are called retroviruses because they ``write" these mirror images of their genetic code upside down and backward. In this way the new and old copies of their individual genes fit together perfectly so they convert temporarily into active, double-stranded viruses, which can go into action as disease-inflicting invaders, Boston Globe reports.

This much was known as the Age of AIDS dawned. But no one was prepared for the holocaust of illness that was to come. Nor can anyone foresee what 25 more years of this disease will entail, beyond knowing that the plight will be far worse, not better, as the nations with the largest populations, China and India, become hot HIV/AIDS zones.