On June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published the first report on AIDS.
Over the following four decades, San Francisco has been at the forefront in responding to the HIV pandemic. "The message is especially important now, given what we're going through with COVID," Dr.
Paul Volberding, one of the first doctors to treat people with HIV and now director of the UCSF AIDS Research Institute, told the Bay Area Reporter. "The two pandemics are obviously very different in many ways, but it's encouraging to see that San Francisco has responded so well to both of them, in many ways leading the world." That report 40 years ago concerned five cases of unusual Pneumocystis pneumonia