Demographic characteristics of HIV: I. How did HIV spread

men and drug addicts. In 1984 came discovery of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), presumed to be the sexually transmitted cause of AIDS. Given an apparent latent period of about 10 years, HIV is thought to have arrived in those communities around 1970. Since 1985, tests for HIV have been widely deployed to detect its anticipated spread into other social groups and geographic locales. HIV-positive people were found in every sector of society and in every part of the United States as soon as testing began. That HIV could have spread so rapidly into the general population across the country from those cities within 15 years is infeasible for several reasons: (1) the geographic distribution of HIV does not look like a spread from the AIDS epicenters; (2) that geographic distribution has not changed in two decades; (3) if anything, the prevalence of HIV has decreased since the mid-1980s; (4) direct studies have revealed that HIV is not readily transmissible. The conclusion seems inescapable: HIV tests do not track a virus that spread from the original centers of the AIDS epidemic. HIV is endemic. It is not the cause of the AIDS epidemics of the early 1980s