Free And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition by Randy Shilts Page B

mother’s body. By January 1978, as she withered away from severe diarrhea caused by an untreatable salmonella infection in her intestines, she flew back to Kinshasa, where she died a month later.
    Weeks after this woman’s death, baffled scientists in Cologne tried to understand why a successful young concert violinist should contract a case of Kaposi’s sarcoma. The German musician was gay and had spent much of the decade traveling across Europe, but this provided no clue as to why he should fall victim to an old man’s disease rarely seen in northern Europe. Nor did it explain why his lymph nodes seemed to explode three months later, as if they were fighting some unseen infection. Answers were no more forthcoming in the excruciating months ahead while doctors helplessly watched the forty-two-year-old’s body be bombarded with disease after disease until finally, in January 1979, he died.
    It was at about that time that Belgian doctors in Zaire began reporting an upsurge in cases of cryptococcosis at Kinshasa’s Memo Yemo General Hospital. By 1980, physicians could document fifteen cases of this disease. The cysts that spread Cryptococcus are found in bird droppings the world over. The problem, therefore, was not the presence of new Cryptococcus germs but of some weakness in the patients’ immunity that let the disease take root.
    In Paris, the first case of the baffling pneumonia also had an African connection, appearing in 1978 when a Portuguese cab driver suddenly experienced difficulty breathing. The short, swarthy man had returned only a year or so before from Angola, where he had served in the Portuguese navy during the Angolan Civil War and, later, as a trucker, driving Angola-Mozambique routes that cut through the narrow coastal spit of western Zaire. Dr. Willy Rozenbaum of Claude-Bernard Hospital was called in to see the man in 1979 and easily diagnosed the parasite Pneumocystis carinii. Unable to fathom what immune problems might have engendered the pneumonia, Rozenbaum enlisted immunologist Jacques Leibowitch to try to solve the problem. Leibowitch was accustomed to seeing bizarre diseases among people who traveled to exotic parts of the world; it seemed he was always treating some airline pilot or steward for some obscure infection. The doctor first tested the man for lymph cancer, the condition that often proves to cause such rare bouts of immune deficiency. But the tests yielded nothing, as did further blood studies. Specialists from all over Paris were trooping to the man’s bedside, drawn both to struggle for a cure and to explore an intriguing medical mystery. Meanwhile, colonies of thick white fungus bloomed in the patient’s mouth and throat, while warts caused by ordinarily benign papovavirus swept over his body, covering his arms and legs.
    The doctors were downright awestricken when the man’s brain became infected with toxoplasmosis, another rare parasite. Nothing they could do yielded any help, however, and in 1980, the man returned to his wife and five children in Portugal to die. As he was nearing death in Iberia, two women were admitted to the intensive care unit of Claude-Bernard with Pneumocystis. One was a Zairian woman, who, like many in the elite of that French-speaking region of central Africa, had sought treatment in the more advanced hospitals of Paris after her African doctors could find no effective treatment for her. The second woman was French, but she, too, had lived recently in Zaire.
    The European fall turned to winter. By the time winter was turning to spring, all of them—the cab driver in Portugal and the two women in Paris—had drowned in the primeval protozoa that had filled their lungs.

    In the United States, unexplained maladies from a mysterious new syndrome would be traced back to 1979. It was on a balmy September day in 1979 that Rick Wellikoff had been sent to Dr. Linda Laubenstein for blood studies. She duly noted the generalized rash that resisted treatment,