[run4yourlives]

An article like this makes you wonder how many different diseases (answer - over 200) get lumped together under the large "cancer" umbrella.

One wonders if we are doing ourselves a disservice maintaining a term more inline with shared symptoms instead of separating the diseases into shared causes.

At any rate I'm digressing, but cancer is a fascinating (while horrible) concept that exists in our reality. When you think about it, it is probably more responsible for what we are today than any other force on the planet, in evolutionary terms.

As for AIDS: The fact that it was a "gay disease" hampered everything about our response to it. I'd like to think that we would be much more in tune with emerging health threats these days, but somehow I doubt it. I really hope we have HIV licked in a few years though, because Africa really, really needs a vaccine before it can do anything else really.

[gilgoomesh]

The diagnosis of Kaposi's Sarcoma was accurate and precise. There was no problem with too much getting "lumped together".

The problem was that they didn't know the cause of the Kaposi's Sarcoma outbreak. They correctly suspected a virus caused the outbreak.

[umanwizard]

Well, Karposi's Sarcoma is a cancer. They weren't wrong about that.

It just happens to be a cancer that is overwhelmingly more common in people suffering from HIV than in the general population.

[GhotiFish]

I always though cancer was an umbrella term for when a cell mutates in such a fashion to lose it's reproductive throttle, and consequently starts consuming as many resources as possible, eventually fragmenting and spreading throughout the body.

What kind of cancers don't fit this definition?

[bencollier49]

Oh, they all fit this definition, but the mutation isn't always spontaneous.

For example, cervical cancer is often caused by HPV, which is why school-age girls are routinely immunised against it in the UK.

[tferraz]

I don't know but the sarcoma the articles says is a symptom present in the last stages of AIDS, when the body is covered with brown "patches" - mostly in the back. Other doctors were investigating other issues at the time, like a strong TB. But it took time for all this different specialists see it was one illness.

[matt-attack]

> The fact that it was a "gay disease" hampered everything about our response to it.

Why "gay disease" in quotes? Was it not a disease with origins exclusively in gays?

[kristopolous]

The first-world people with access to world class health care that contracted it in urban environments were gay. Origins however, are a bit more murky.

Most of the worlds population don't have the financial resources or the proximity to say, the UCSF medical hospital, where such specialty physicians would be to study such a thing.

There's been quite a bit of discussion of how it got to Christopher Street in New York. My pet theory is that the international drug trade had quite a bit to do with it, but I'm just a computer programmer

[run4yourlives]

From Wiki: At one point, the CDC coined the phrase "the 4H disease", since the syndrome seemed to affect Haitians, homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and heroin users. In the general press, the term "GRID", which stood for gay-related immune deficiency, had been coined.[180] However, after determining that AIDS was not isolated to the gay community,[178] it was realized that the term GRID was misleading and the term AIDS was introduced at a meeting in July 1982.[181] By September 1982 the CDC started referring to the disease as AIDS.[182]