Rare cancer seen in 41 homossexuals (1981) | Hacker News Reader

Rare cancer seen in 41 homossexuals (1981)

nytimes.com

37 pointsmarcodiego10 comments

I find reading old news articles quite enjoyable. It is fun to look back at points in time and see how people viewed a situation in that moment. In this case, the doctors who were interviewed.

I found it fascinating scientists were already making the connections to immune system problems, which, in fact, turned out to be a hallmark of the disease. They were on the right track, and yet given how far buried that detail was in this story, you get the sense it wasn’t the flashing red light we know it to be.

Interesting to consider how, if at all, your views on /today's/ current events are being reflected in the press now.

Interesting to see them call it a cancer, before figuring it out later. What else do we currently call a cancer that will be more clearly defined later on?

It was/is cancer, caused by a distinct virus (KSHV) due to a compromised immune system (from the HIV->AIDS progression). Very similar to HPV leading to cervical cancer and HepC leading to liver cancer (tangentially, a significant amount of cancer occurrences are caused by viruses; HepB and HPV vaccines are materially driving down cancer rates globally).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaposi%27s_sarcoma

Interesting. I never knew that.

Likewise, cancers such as mesothelioma caused by SV40, often introduced by contaminated Polio vaccines used in regions like USA and Italy in the 1950s-60s.

HPV is causing mouth/throat cancer, too.

Cancer is a fairly well-defined term, and I can't think of any instances of something being defined as a cancer and then redefined.

The problem is that cancer isn't one disease. It's an overgrowth of cells, with many different causes. Often the cause is a chain of events. As in this case, where HIV knocks out the immune system, allowing a herpesvirus to infect cells. There's a very good chance that you have this virus now, but your immune system is keeping it from causing damage.

Kaposi's sarcoma is a skin disease, making it very visible. For a while it was a trope in movies that the gay character would get purple blotches on their face, and you knew that they were going to die.

This article was one of the first to bring that to the public's attention. The cancer led to the discovery of the suppressed immune system, and it was called Gay Related Immune Disorder (GRID) for a few years. Then it was traced to others, including drug users who shared needles, and it was renamed Auto Immune Deficiency Syndrome. They still hadn't found the cause, which turned out to be a virus that they called HIV.

Part of what makes medicine so hard is that everything is a complicated chain of events, positive and negative feedback loops, and locating the root cause takes a long time. Cancer is the end of that chain of events, and by the time it's visible, it can be impossible to fight it at the root.

> it was renamed Auto Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

Correction: AIDS stands for "Acquired ImmunoDeficiency Syndrome". "Autoimmune" refers to something else - it's when the body's immune system attacks the body's own healthy cells.

I see a parallel with the way covid was initially publicized: as a chinese virus.

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