TIME Magazine content is available exclusively for TIME subscribers.

Current subscribers for full access. Not a TIME subscriber? .

Medicine: The Deadly Spread of AIDS

Homosexuals, Haitians and hemophiliacs fall victim

It began suddenly, in the autumn of 1979. Young homosexual men with a history of promiscuity started showing up at the medical clinics of New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco with a bizarre array of ailments. Some had Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a deadly disease rarely seen except in drug-weakened cancer and transplant patients. Others bore the purplish skin lesions of Kaposi's sarcoma, a cancer that is usually confined to elderly men of Mediterranean extraction and young males in Equatorial Africa. Still others had developed strange...

For use in rail of Articles page or Section Fronts pages. Duplicate and change name as necesssary to distinguish.