Florida doctors
report having seen early AIDS cases

Although the beginning of the AIDS epidemic is widely accepted as the June 1981 report of five gay men in Los Angeles suffering from an unusual form of pneumonia, health officials in South Florida say they believe they saw early AIDS cases as much as one year earlier, The Miami Herald reports. Doctors at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami say they treated several patients in 1980 who had failing immune systems and largely unexplainable infections. They now believe these patients--primarily gay men but also heterosexual men and women from Haiti--to have been the region's first AIDS cases. In 1983 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention listed Haitians as a unique risk group for HIV infection, along with injection-drug users, gay men, and hemophiliacs, Haitians were removed from the high-risk list two years later. (The Advocate)