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25th Anniversary of First Reported Cases of AIDS

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Brief Description:
In the 25 years since the first reported cases, the human immunodeficiency virus or HIV, the cause of AIDS has infected more 65 million people world wide.

Transcript:
Thornton: In the 25 years since the first reported cases, the human immunodeficiency virus or HIV, the cause of AIDS has infected more 65 million people world wide. In the United States it's estimated that one million people are living with the HIV infection and there are 40,000 new occurrences each year. During a recent videocast, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases talks about the devastating effects of this virus.

Fauci: We went from a few cases that caused anxiety to the explosion of historically, clearly, one of the top few handful of catastrophic pandemics that our civilization has ever been confronted with, with — as you know — 25 million deaths over 60 million total populations and these are the lasted revised UNAIDS numbers.

Thornton: AIDS research continues to find new ways of promoting less toxic medicine that have fewer side effects. During the videocast, NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, talked about the efforts to find a cure.

Zerhouni: I think that the efforts of NIH across all institutes; from behavioral research, to sexually transmitted diseases, to the prevention of that disease, to the understanding of molecular events will hopefully one day provide us with a solution.

Thornton: You can read more about the 25 years of NIH AIDS research at the website www.25yearsofaids.oar.nih.gov. You can see the videocast by logging on to www.videocast.nih.gov. From the National Institutes of Health I'm Matt Thornton in Bethesda, Maryland.

This page was last reviewed on June 9, 2006 .

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