Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia

The very first person to describe AIDS cases—Michael Gottlieb in Los Angeles describing five homosexual men with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia—himself was already suggesting that it was caused by a herpes type virus, Cytomegalovirus. After that Epstein-Barr virus was blamed, HTLV-1, and finally you have HIV. That was the result of the virus hunters being in a dominant position in the establishment. That's the reason that AIDS wasn't blamed on a bacterium or on an environmental cause or a toxicological cause. The virus hunters controlled biomedical research and the biomedical research establishment, and had done so since the war on polio, and had done so because the NIH was an overfed bureaucratic agency that had in fact created by far the largest scientific research establishment in the history of the world—more technicians wearing lab coats, grinding out more data on a daily basis. It only gets worse every year. Bryan Ellison Interview

In the period October 1980-May 1981, 5 young men, all active homosecuals, were treated [with TMP/SMX=Trimethoprim/Sulfamethoxazole=Co-trimoxazole] for biopsy-confirmed Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia at 3 different hospitals in Los Angeles, California. Two of the patients died. [...] Patient 1: [...] The patient's condition deteriorated despite courses of treatment with trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole (TMP/SMX), pentamidine, and acyclovir. He died May 3, and postmortem examination showed residual P. carinii and CMV pneumonia, but no evidence of neoplasia. [...] The 5 did not have comparable histories of sexually transmitted disease [...] All 5 reported using inhalant drugs, and one reported parenteral drug abuse. [...] Editorial Note: Pneumocystis pneumonia in the United States is almost exclusively limited to very immunosuppressed patients (1). [...] The fact that these patients were all homosexuals suggests an association between some aspect of a homosexual lifestyle or disease acquired through sexual contact and Pneumocystis pneumonia in this population. http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/resources/reports/mmwr/pdf/mmwr05jun81.pdf

During the past 30 months, Kaposi's sarcoma (KS), an uncommonly reported malignancy in the United States, has been diagnosed in 26 homosexual men (20 in New York City (NYC); 6 in California). [...] Six patients had pneumonia (4 biopsy confirmed as due to [i]Pneumocystis carinii (PC)), and one had necrotizing toxoplasmosis of the central nervous system. [...] Secondly, the disease [KS] appears to have a higher incidence in renal transplant recipients (6-9) and in others receiving immunosuppressive therapy (10-12). http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/resources/reports/mmwr/pdf/mmwr04jul81.pdf