From a 2006 Frontline interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci:
What was your first experience with HIV/AIDS?
Well, my first experience with HIV/AIDS I remember very clearly. I was sitting in my office at the NIH [National Institutes of Health] Clinical Center going through some literature that comes on my desk daily, and I saw the first Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report [MMWR]from the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] about these unusual cases that had occurred in L.A. and New York -- Pneumocystis pneumonia and Kaposi's sarcoma.
I remember being somewhat puzzled as to what exactly this meant. Was it some strange drug that a group of gay men had consumed that acutely and severely immunosuppressed them for them to get Pneumocystis and Kaposi's sarcoma, which we had known for years and years had been associated with an immunosuppressed state? I remember getting a feeling of anxiety about that, of this unknown, but it was only a few cases, and I had a lot of other things going on, so I pushed it to the back of my mind. But it kind of stood there for a while.
Then when the second MMWR came out later in the summer, then I remember getting a very chilly feeling that we were dealing with a brand-new communicable disease. I had no idea what it was, but the way it was acting was strongly suggestive of it being a communicable disease. It was an interesting, unique feeling, because it isn't very often in one's career that you run into truly a new disease. So I felt first something a little vague, a little confusing, and then a feeling of some significant anxiety about what the heck was going on here.
Here in 2011, the world is reaching a nexus of circumstance that could once again chill those at the forefront of disease. The world's resources cannot meets our needs. Climate change is making rearranging patterns of livelihood. Technology is scaring the powers-that-be. Economies are crumbling. And as the same time as new diseases are emerging, successful treatments for old diseases are failing.
Hopefully we can find the patterns before too much misery is inflicted.
(Read more of the Anthony Fauci interview)