Does AIDS only affect gay men?
Published in Daily Trivia
No, anyone can contract AIDS. One possibility for the misconception that AIDS infects only homosexual men is that AIDS was termed Gay Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome when it was first recognized in 1981 (it was subsequently renamed after it was recognised that there were methods of transmission other than male-male intercourse). HIV appears to have entered the United States around the late 1960s and seems to have then been unknowingly spread by people throughout the U.S. and Europe. In a survey on AIDS conducted in 1983 in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom a slight majority of those infected with HIV were male homosexuals (58% of all cases).
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