Earliest cases of HIV/AIDS in Singapore

=Early US reports=

In the first half of the 1980s, Singaporeans, especially the gay community, read with increasing disquiet the development of a new scourge called AIDS which was first clinically observed in 1981 in the United States. The initial cases were a cluster of injection drug users and gay men with no known cause of impaired immunity who showed symptoms of Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP), a rare opportunistic infection that was known to occur in people with very compromised immune systems. Soon thereafter, additional gay men developed a previously rare skin cancer called Kaposi's sarcoma (KS). Many more cases of PCP and KS emerged, alerting the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and a CDC task force was formed to monitor the outbreak. The Singaporean gay community, already marginalised and discriminated against, was horrified that the mysterious malady was being referred to with negatively sensationalistic terms such as the "gay plague" and "gay cancer".

In the beginning, the CDC did not have a definitive name for the disease, often referring to it by way of the diseases that were associated with it, for example, lymphadenopathy, the disease after which the discoverers of HIV originally named the virus. In the general press, the term GRID, which stood for gay-related immune deficiency, had been coined. It came as some relief to some gay Singaporeans when the CDC, in search of a name, and looking at the infected communities discovered that it not only affected the gay community but also heroin users, haemophiliacs, and Haitians. It was thus also nicknamed "the 4H disease". However, after determining that AIDS was not confined to homosexuals, it was realised that the term GRID was misleading and "AIDS" was introduced at a meeting in July 1982. By September 1982 the CDC had started officially using the name AIDS.

In 1983, two separate research groups led by American Robert Gallo and French investigators Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier independently declared that a novel retrovirus may have been infecting AIDS patients, and published their findings in the same issue of the journal Science. Gallo claimed that a virus his group had isolated from a person with AIDS was strikingly similar in shape to other human T-lymphotropic viruses (HTLVs) his group had been the first to isolate. Gallo's group called their newly-isolated virus HTLV-III. At the same time, Montagnier's group isolated a virus from a patient presenting with swelling of the lymph nodes of the neck and physical weakness, two classic symptoms of primary HIV infection. Contradicting the report from Gallo's group, Montagnier and his colleagues showed that core proteins of this virus were immunologically different from those of HTLV-I. Montagnier's group named their isolated virus lymphadenopathy-associated virus (LAV). As these two viruses turned out to be the same, in 1986 LAV and HTLV-III were renamed HIV.

=Calm before the storm=

=See also=
 * Archive of "Three in S’pore found with Aids-linked virus", The Straits Times, 10 April 1985
 * Archive of "Aids virus: Doctor who 'found it'", The Sunday Times, 14 April 1985
 * Archive of "Aids on ‘must report’ list", The Straits Times, 17 April 1985
 * Archive of "Undergrads to be taught about Aids", The Straits Times, 21 April 1885
 * Archive of "16 more may be carriers of Aids virus", The Straits Times, 30 April 1985
 * Archive of "Special lab to do Aids tests soon", The Straits Times, 18 May 1985
 * Archive of "Man with Aids related virus in hospital", The Straits Times, 21 July 1985
 * Archive of "Ministry steps up Aids drive", The Straits Times, 5 September 1985
 * Archive of "S’pore-Stanford research tie-up bid", The Straits Times, 10 October 1985
 * Archive of "Aids: 20,000 cleared", The Straits Times, 29 November 1985
 * Archive of "Screening tests likely to uncover more Aids carriers", The Straits Times, 1 May 1986
 * Archive of "Aids claims first victim here", The Straits Times, 11 April 1987
 * Archive of "Fear of Aids pushes up condom sales", The Straits Times, 19 April 1987
 * Archive of "Govt dental clinics phasing out boiling", The Straits Times, 1 October 1987
 * HIV/AIDS in Singapore's LGBT community
 * Paddy Chew
 * Avin Tan
 * Ajmal Khan
 * Calvin Tan
 * Adrian Tyler

=See also=

=References=

=Acknowledgements=

This article was written by Roy Tan.