the alleged first known death from AIDS in the united states to raise interest was a 16 year old black teenager named robert lee rayford.
he was born in st louis missouri. he lived in a black working class neighborhood raised by a single mother. other than that, we know nothing about his personal life.
all we know is that he was very, very sick.
he first admitted himself to the hospital in 1968 when he was 15.
he was thin, pale, and could barely breathe. but that wasn't what he had come to the hospital for. that had been going on since 1966.
he had come to the hospital because his genitals were swollen and covered in lesions and warts. it had gotten so bad that it had spread to his legs.
at first, the medical team figured he simply had untreated lymphedema. testing actually revealed he had such a severe chlamydia infection that it had spread throughout his entire body.
when asked if he was sexually active, he first blustered that of course he was, he was the stud of all time.
then, thinking better of it, stated that he had only had sex once, with a girl he knew. he said he might have gotten it from her.
he was sullen and withdrawn. didn't talk much. except for one thing. he vehemently refused any further testing that would have involved a rectal examination.
his medical team presumed that this 15 year old boy refused the rectal examination because he was a sex worker who recieved.
aggressive treatment stabilized him by 1968.
in march 1969, he was back in the hospital.
he had pneumonia. he had an incredible fever. he was gasping for each breath. his white blood cell count had plummeted.
he died two months later.
his autopsy revealed that he had Kaposi's sarcoma, an incredibly rare type of immune system suppressing cancer that had only previously been reported in immunocompromised elderly men with herpes, and even then it only primarily affected their legs. it should have been impossible for a black teen from america to have it all over his internal organs.
this medical anomaly would first be reported on in 1973.
in 1982, when the disease had started to appear in otherwise healthy cis white straight men (and/or their wives), the CDC realized that GRID, gay-related immune deficiency, and 4H disease (homosexuals, heroin addicts, hemophiliacs, and Haitians) were misnomers that left people vulnerable. they would begin calling the disease AIDS.
in 1983, HIV, the disease that causes AIDS, was discovered in France. it was the discovery that broke ground on preventing the spread of HIV, definitvely identifying it, and reversing the death sentence of developing AIDS.
in 1984, when the first rudimentary AIDs test was being developed and before the epidemic would reach its reported height, one of the doctors who had treated robert thawed a sample of his tissue for testing.
the ELISA antigen/antibody test would be approved by the food and drug administration in 1985.
in 1987, after the western blot antibody test had been developed robert's tissue samples were tested again.
the western blot works by identifying the residual proteins left behind by the creation process of antibodies.
robert's tissues had of the had nine out of the nine known residual proteins left behind by antibodies created to fight HIV. there was just one problem:
the dna of the virus robert had back in 1969, once isolated, was similar, but not exact, to the isolates that had first been discovered in 1983.
thus, there was never any confirmation given that robert was the first death from aids reported in the united states.
in 2005, all remaining samples of robert's tissues were destroyed by hurricane katrina.
as early as 1966, if this country had given enough of a fuck about black people, we could have identified HIV.
if this country had given enough of a fuck about queer people, we could have preserved an entire culture.
the aids epidemic was a fucking genocide.
