In June 1981, after completing my medical residency in pediatrics, I was about to start a job as a pediatrician in a clinic in Chicago. I dreaded leaving the Northeast and being far from my best friend from medical school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Dr. Edwin (Eddie) Valdiserri, a brilliant, funny, kind, and caring person. Before I moved to Chicago, I visited Eddie in Philadelphia. During that visit, Eddie and I discussed a recent article that had appeared in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), a weekly newsletter published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The article was about five young, previously healthy homosexual men who had been treated for Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia and candida (yeast) infection of the mouth (thrush). Although these diseases were well known, they were never seen in healthy adults; these illnesses were seen only in people who had been treated with medicines that suppressed their immune defenses so they would not reject transplanted organs, or in other very severely ill patients. The article stated that two of the men had died. Descriptions of the five patients’ cases were very strange.
