When and where was AIDS first discovered?

Okay, here's the English translation in Markdown format:

To address this question, let's talk in plain language.

AIDS was first officially discovered in the United States in 1981

You can think of this process like a medical "detective story."

The Case: Strange "Mass Immune System Failure" Detected

Time: 1981
Location: The United States, primarily big cities like Los Angeles and New York.

At the time, doctors noticed a very strange phenomenon: some young men who were usually perfectly healthy suddenly developed very rare and hard-to-treat illnesses.

For example:

Kaposi's Sarcoma: A rare type of skin cancer typically only seen in the elderly or people with severely compromised immune systems.
Pneumocystis Pneumonia (PCP): Another extremely rare type of pneumonia that only attacks people whose immune systems have already collapsed.

Think of the human immune system like a nation's army, constantly fighting off invaders (bacteria, viruses). The illnesses these young men were getting were like common thieves (rare pathogens) somehow managing to storm the "command center," effectively destroying the "national defense system."

This was highly abnormal! It meant that these young men's "immune armies" had, for some unknown reason, collectively "laid down their arms." On June 5, 1981, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) first officially reported this phenomenon in their publication. This day is consequently recognized as the landmark date when AIDS was formally discovered.

Naming: From Strange Disease to "AIDS"

After discovering this strange condition, they didn't have a name for it initially. It wasn't until 1982 that scientists named it based on its defining characteristics—not innate, but acquired, and involving a deficiency in the immune system:

Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome

The abbreviation for this name is what we know today as AIDS.

Solving the Case: Identifying the Real Culprit, HIV

It's crucial to note that in 1981 and 1982, people only knew about this terrifying "phenomenon" or "syndrome," but they didn't know what caused it.

It wasn't until 1983-1984 that research teams in France and the United States discovered the true culprit causing AIDS—a virus specifically targeting the human immune system. This virus was later named the "Human Immunodeficiency Virus", or HIV.

Important Clarification: Place of Discovery ≠ Place of Origin

There's a critical concept to distinguish here:

Place of First Discovery (1981, USA): Refers to where AIDS was first identified, documented, and reported as a public health crisis by the medical community.
Virus Origin (Earlier, Africa): Subsequent scientific research discovered that the HIV virus had likely crossed over from chimpanzees to humans in Africa as early as the beginning of the 20th century. The earliest confirmed human sample currently identified is from a man living in the Belgian Congo in 1959. However, it hadn't caused a large-scale outbreak back then and remained unidentified.

To summarize:

The "syndrome" known as AIDS was first detected by doctors, raising the alarm, in the United States in 1981. But the "virus" that causes this disease likely existed quietly on the African continent for a much longer time.