The First Scientific Report on the AIDS Epidemic
History Daily
History Daily
4.4 • 2.5K Ratings
🗓️ 5 June 2026
⏱️ 26 minutes
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Summary
June 5, 1981. The Centers for Disease Control identifies five cases of a rare infection striking gay men in California—a disease that will become known as AIDS. This episode originally aired in 2024.
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| 0:46.4 | It's a little after 11 a.m. on December 5th, 1980, at St. Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco, California. |
| 0:51.2 | Dr. Jim Groundwater presses a button to call in his next patient. |
| 0:55.3 | Ken Horn is the man's name, but Dr. Groundwater's not been looking forward to this appointment. He's seen Ken a lot over the past few months, and every time he's |
| 1:00.4 | been stumped by the 37-year-old's condition. The door opens and Ken shuffles in. As Dr. Groundwater |
| 1:07.2 | shakes Ken's hand, he can see that Ken's been crying. Gently, he asks Ken to remove his shirt and step onto the scales. As Ken fumbles with his |
| 1:16.0 | buttons and removes his shirt, Dr. Groundwater tries to hide his shock. Ken is gone, far more so |
| 1:22.4 | than his last appointment. It's almost like he's wasting away. The scales confirm Dr. Groundwater's fears. |
| 1:30.5 | Ken has lost another seven pounds. And as he steps off the scale, he reels off a list of |
| 1:35.8 | symptoms that Dr. Groundwater knows all too well by now, fatigue, diarrhea, nausea, and strange |
| 1:42.1 | purple lesions on his chest. There is no doubt that Ken is dangerously ill, but Dr. Groundwater can't work out what's causing it. |
| 1:50.0 | All he can do is keep trying different tests. |
| 1:54.0 | He explains that he's going to send Ken for a biopsy of his lymph nodes. |
| 1:58.0 | That might rule out cancer. |
| 2:00.0 | But Dr. Groundwater knows that just eliminating |
| 2:03.5 | possibilities isn't good enough. He needs to find out what is causing Ken suffering, and he needs |
| 2:09.1 | to do it quickly. Because if there's one thing that is clear to Dr. Groundwater, it's that Ken |
| 2:14.4 | is running out of time. |
... |
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