i wonder how many people have died from aids over the years but their death is blamed on something else
>> 1955–1957: David Carr
The oldest putative case of the then-unknown syndrome was thought to be a 1959 observation, when David Carr, a 25-year-old British printer who had served in the Royal Navy between 1955 and 1957 (but apparently not in Africa) sought help at the Royal Infirmary of Manchester, England. He was reported to be suffering from puzzling symptoms, among them purplish skin lesions, for nearly two years. His condition deteriorated during Christmas 1958 when he started suffering from shortness of breath, extreme fatigue, rapid weight loss, night sweats, and high fever. Doctors thought he might be suffering from tuberculosis and even though they found no evidence of bacterial infection, they treated him for tuberculosis as a safety measure, but without success. Carr continued to weaken and he died shortly after in August 1959. His autopsy revealed evidence of two unusual infections, cytomegalovirus and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP, later renamed Pneumocystis pneumonia when redetermined to be P. jirovecii), very rare at the time but now commonly associated with AIDS patients. His case puzzled his doctors, who preserved tissue samples from him and for years retained some interest in solving the mystery.
Sir Robert Platt, then president of the Royal College of Physicians, wrote in the printer's hospital chart that he wondered "If we are in for a new wave of virus disease now that the bacterial illnesses are so nearly conquered". It was only 31 years later, after the AIDS pandemic had become well-known and widespread, that they decided to perform HIV tests on Carr's preserved tissues, which initially returned a positive result. The British medical journal The Lancet reported Carr's case in its July 7, 1990 issue, but later retracted its claim of positive identification in the January 20, 1996 issue, reporting that the tissue sample had become contaminated in the laboratory. <<