Among these are mandatory testing of all citizens or of particular populations (for example, marriage license applicants); discrimination in housing, employment, and medical treatment; and confidentiality versus notification of sex partners.
The first case of AIDS was identified in New York in 1979. The cause of the disease, a retrovirus now called Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV; see HTLV), was identified in 1983-84 by scientists working at the National Cancer Institute in the United States and the Pasteur Institute in France. These workers also developed tests for AIDS, enabling researchers to follow the transmission of the virus and to study the origin and mechanism of the disease. Close relatives of the AIDS virus infect some African monkeys. This fact and the high incidence of infection of people in central Africa has led to the opinion that the AIDS virus originated there. In 1990, the World Health Organization announced that 203,599 cases of AIDS were reported worldwide by the end of 1989, and estimated the actual number of cases to be 600,000.