• HIV-2, a viral variant found in West Africa, is thought to have transferred to people from sooty mangabey monkeys in Guinea-Bissau during this period.

• Jerome Horwitz of Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute and Wayne State University School of Medicine synthesized AZT, under a US National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant. AZT was originally intended as an anticancer drug.

• Genetic studies of the virus indicate that, in or about 1966, HIV first arrived in the Americas, infecting a single person in Haiti. At this time, many Haitians were working in Congo, providing the opportunity for infection.

• A 2003 analysis of HIV types found in the United States, compared to known mutation rates, suggests that the virus may have first arrived in the United States in this year. The disease spread from the 1966 American strand, but remained unrecognized for another 12 years.

• A St. Louis teenager, identified only as Robert R., dies of an illness that baffles his doctors. Eighteen years later, molecular biologists at Tulane University in New Orleans test samples of his remains and find the virus that causes AIDS.

• The first reports of wasting and other symptoms, later determined to be AIDS, are reported in residents of Africa.

• Norwegian sailor Arvid Noe dies; it is later determined that he contracted HIV/AIDS in Africa during the early 1960s.

• Danish physician Grethe Rask dies of AIDS contracted in Africa.
• A San Francisco prostitute gives birth to the first of three children who would later be diagnosed with AIDS, and whose blood, when tested after their deaths, would reveal HIV infection. The mother would herself die of AIDS in May 1987. She was clearly infected by 1977 and perhaps earlier.

• A Portuguese man known as Senhor Jose dies; he will later be confirmed as the first known infection of HIV-2. He was believed to have been exposed to the disease in Guinea-Bissau in 1966.

1980s

• April 24, San Francisco resident Ken Horne, the first AIDS case in the United States to be recognized at the time, is reported to Center for Disease Control with Kaposi's sarcoma (KS). He was also suffering from Cryptococcus at the time.
• On October 31, French-Canadian flight attendant Gaëtan Dugas pays his first known visit to New York City bathhouses. He would later be deemed "Patient Zero" for his apparent connection to many early cases of AIDS in the United States.
• Rick Wellikoff, a Brooklyn schoolteacher, dies of AIDS in New York City on December 23. He is the 4th American to have died from the new disease.

• January 15, Nick Rock becomes the first known AIDS death in New York City.
• May 18, Dr. Lawrence Mass becomes the first journalist in the world to write about the epidemic, in the "New York Native," a gay newspaper. A gay tipster overheard his physician mention that some gay men were being treated in intensive-care units in New York City for a strange pneumonia. "Disease Rumors Largely Unfounded" was the headline on Mass's article. Mass repeated a New York City public-health official's claims that there was no wave of disease sweeping through the gay community. At this point, however, the CDC had been gathering information for about a month on the outbreak that Mass's source was dismissing.
• June 5, The CDC reports a cluster of Pneumocystis pneumonia in five gay men in Los Angeles.
• July 4, CDC reports clusters of Kaposi's sarcoma and Pneumocystis pneumonia among gay men in California and New York City.
• By the end of the year, 121 people are known to have died from the disease.
• First known case in the United Kingdom.

• June 18, CDC MMWR 1982 31(23);305-7

• July 9, CDC reports a cluster of opportunistic infections (OOI) and Kaposi's sarcoma among Haitians recently entering the United States.
• July 27, The term AIDS (for acquired immune deficiency syndrome) is proposed at a meeting in Washington of gay-community leaders, federal bureaucrats and the CDC.
• Summer, First known case in Italy
• September 24, Current Trends Update on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) - United States

• December 10, a baby in California becomes ill in the first known case of AIDS from a blood transfusion.
• First known case in Brazil.
• First known case in Canada.

• In January, Dr. Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, isolates a retrovirus that kills T-cells from the lymph system of a gay AIDS patient. In the following months, she would find it in additional gay and hemophiliac sufferers. This retrovirus would be called by several names, including LAV and HTLV-III before being named HIV in 1986.
• CDC National AIDS Hotline established.
• March, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issues donor screening guidelines. AIDS high-risk groups should not donate blood/plasma products.
• Australia has first death from AIDS in Melbourne, the Hawke Labor government invests in a significant campaign that ultimately gives Australia one of the lowest infection rates in the world.
• AIDS is diagnosed in Mexico for the first time. HIV can be traced in the country back to 1981.

• April 23, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler announces at a press conference that an American scientist, Dr. Robert Gallo, has discovered the probable cause of AIDS: the retrovirus subsequently named human immunodeficiency virus or HIV in 1986. She also declares that a vaccine will be available within two years.
• September 6, first performance at Theatre Rhinoceros in San Francisco of The AIDS Show which runs for two years and is the subject of a 1986 documentary film of the same name.
• December 17, Ryan White was diagnosed with AIDS by a doctor performing a partial lung removal. White became infected with HIV from a blood product, known as Factor VIII, as part of his treatment for hemophilia which was given to him on a regular basis. When the public school that he attended, Western Middle School in Russiaville, Indiana, learned of his disease in 1985 there was enormous pressure from parents and faculty to bar him from school premises. Due to the widespread fear of AIDS and lack of medical knowledge, principal Ron Colby and the schoolboard assented. His family filed a lawsuit, seeking to overturn the ban.

• March 2, FDA approves first AIDS antibody screening tests for use on all donated blood and plasma intended for transfusion.
• October 2, Rock Hudson, the first American celebrity to publicly admit having AIDS, dies of the disease.
• October, a conference of public health officials including representatives of the Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organisation meet in Bangui and define AIDS in Africa as "prolonged fevers for a month or more, weight loss of over 10% and prolonged diarrhoea".
• First officially reported cases in China.

• HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) is adopted as name of the retrovirus that was first proposed as the cause of AIDS by Luc Montagnier of France, who named it LAV (lymphadenopathy associated virus) and Robert Gallo of the United States, who named it HTLV-III (human T-lymphotropic virus type III)
• January 14, "...one million Americans have already been infected with the virus and that this number will jump to at least 2 million or 3 million within 5 to 10 years..." - NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, New York Times.
• Model Gia Marie Carangi dies of AIDS related illness on November 18.
• First officially known cases in the U.S.S.R. and India.

• AZT (zidovudine), the first antiretroviral drug, becomes available to treat HIV.
• Charles Ludlam dies of PCP pneumonia due to AIDS on May 28, 1987.

• December 1, the first World AIDS Day
• December 16, American Singer James Sylvester dies of Aids-related lilness

• The television movie "The Ryan White Story" aired. It starred Judith Light as Jeanne, Lukas Haas as Ryan and Nikki Cox as sister Andrea. Ryan White had a small cameo appearance as Chad, a young patient with AIDS. Another AIDS-themed film, The Littlest Victims, debuted in 1989, biopicing James Oleske, the first U.S. pyhsician to discover AIDS in newborns during AIDS' early years, when many thought it was only homosexually-spread.

1990s

• Ryan White - Dies on April 8, 1990 at the age of 18 from pneumonia caused by AIDS complications.
• Congress enacted The Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act or Ryan White Care Act, the United States' largest federally funded health related program (excluding Medicaid and Medicare).

• A little over 24 hours after issuing the statement confirming that he has been tested HIV positive and had AIDS, Freddie Mercury (Singer of the British band Queen) dies on November 24, 1991 at the age of 45. The official cause of death was bronchial pneumonia resulting from AIDS.
• NBA star Magic Johnson publicly announces that he is HIV-positive.

• The first combination drug therapies for HIV are introduced. Such "cocktails" are more effective than AZT alone and slow down the development of drug resistance.
• American actor Anthony Perkins, known for his role as Norman Bates in the Psycho movies, dies from AIDS.
• Australian singer Peter Allen dies from complications due to AIDS on June 18, 1992
• Popular science fiction writer Isaac Asimov dies on April 6. Ten years later, his wife revealed that his death was due to AIDS-related complications. The writer was infected during a blood transfusion in 1983.

• The PCR (polymerase chain reaction) technique is developed by Kary Mullis, improving the researches on microbiology and genetics, also widely used in AIDS research.

• Saquinavir, a new type of protease inhibitor drug, becomes available to treat HIV. Highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) becomes possible. Within two years, death rates due to AIDS will have plummeted in the developed world.

• Robert Gallo's discovery that some natural compounds known as chemokines can block HIV and halt the progression of AIDS is hailed by Science magazine as one of that year's most important scientific breakthroughs.

• September 2, "The most recent estimate of the number of Americans infected (with HIV), 750,000, is only half the total that government officials used to cite over a decade ago, at a time when experts believed that as many as 1.5 million people carried the virus." article in the Washington Post
• Based on the Bangui definition the WHO's cumulative number of reported AIDS cases from 1980 through 1997 for all of Africa is 620,000. For comparison, the cumulative total of AIDS cases in the USA through 1997 is 641,087.
• December 7, "French President Jacques Chirac addressed Africa's top AIDS conference on Sunday and called on the world's richest nations to create an AIDS therapy support fund to help Africa. According to Chirac, Africa struggles to care for two-thirds of the world's persons with AIDS without the benefit of expensive AIDS therapies. Chirac invited other countries, especially European nations, to create a fund that would help increase the number of AIDS studies and experiments. AIDS workers welcomed Chirac's speech and said they hoped France would promote the idea to the Group of Eight summit of the world's richest nations.” { ref name=`Bunce 1997' | publisher = Reuters | url = http://www.aegis.com/news/ads/1997/AD972244.html }

• December 10, International Human Rights Day, Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) is launched to campaign for greater access to HIV treatment for all South Africans, by raising public awareness and understanding about issues surrounding the availability, affordability and use of HIV treatments. TAC campaigns against the view that AIDS is a death sentence.

• January 31, studies suggest that a retrovirus, SIVcpz (simian immunodeficiency virus) from the common chimpanzee Pan troglodytes, may have passed to human populations in west equatorial Africa during the twentieth century and developed into various types of HIV.
• Edward Hooper releases a book called The River, which accuses doctors who tested a polio vaccine in 1950s Africa of unintentionally starting the AIDS epidemic. The theory receives a great deal of publicity.

2000s

• WHO estimates between 15% and 20% of new HIV infections worldwide are the result of blood transfusions, where the donors were not screened or inadequately screened for HIV.

• September 21, FDA licenses the first nucleic acid test (NAT) systems intended for screening of blood and plasma donors.

• January 5, "Individual risk of acquiring HIV and experiencing rapid disease progression is not uniform within populations", says Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., director of NIAID.

• January 21, CDC recommends anti-retroviral post-exposure prophylaxis for people exposed to HIV from rapes, accidents or occasional unsafe sex or drug use. This treatment should start no more than 72 hours after a person has been exposed to the virus, and the drugs should be used by patients for 28 days. This emergency drug treatment has been recommended since 1996 for health-care workers accidentally stuck with a needle, splashed in the eye with blood, or exposed in some other way on the job.
• A highly resistant strain of HIV linked to rapid progression to AIDS is identified in New York City.

• November 9, SIV found in Gorillas