The official birth date of the AIDS epidemic is 5 June 1981. In an article of fewer than 500 words published in the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, American clinicians described a cluster of five cases of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a very rare infection of the lungs hitherto seen only in patients with severely compromised immune systems. These five initial cases were diagnosed between October 1980 and May 1981. All were gay men living in Los Angeles who had previously been healthy and were not receiving drugs that suppressed the body’s immune response. Quite a strange coincidence.

Chapter 8 explains how blood-borne viruses are transmitted through contaminated injections. Throughout the world, intravenous drug users are a high-risk population for HIV and the hepatitis C virus. Medical interventions that re-used unsterilised syringes and needles were also implicated in the transmission of blood-borne viruses. In Egypt, millions were infected with the hepatitis C virus through the mass treatment of schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers were infected with the hepatitis B virus during World War II through a contaminated yellow fever vaccine. In Romania, Libya, the former Soviet Union, and more recently in Cambodia and Pakistan, large outbreaks of iatrogenic HIV infection have been reported and continue to occur.