Many more cases of PJP and KS emerged, alerting U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and a CDC task force was formed to monitor the outbreak. The earliest retrospectively described case of AIDS is believed to have been in Norway beginning in 1966.In the beginning, the CDC did not have an official name for the disease, often referring to it by way of the diseases that were associated with it, for example, lymphadenopathy, the disease after which the discoverers of HIV originally named the virus. They also used Kaposis Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections, the name by which a task force had been set up in 1981. In the general press, the term GRID, which stood for gay-related immune deficiency, had been coined. The CDC, in search of a name and looking at the infected communities, coined "the 4H disease", as it seemed to single out homosexuals, heroin users, hemophiliacs, and Haitians. However, after determining that AIDS was not isolated to the gay community, it was realized that the term GRID was misleading and AIDS was introduced at a meeting in July 1982. By September 1982 the CDC started using the name AIDS.In 1983, two separate research groups led by American Robert Gallo and French investigators Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier independently declared that a novel retrovirus may have been infecting AIDS patients, and published their findings in the same issue of the journal Science.
For example, in 2001 less than 1% of the sexually active urban population in Africa had been tested, and this proportion is even lower in rural populations. Furthermore, in 2001 only 0.5% of pregnant women attending urban health facilities were counselled, tested or received their test results. Again, this proportion is even lower in rural health facilities. Since donors may therefore be unaware of their infection, donor blood and blood products used in medicine and medical research are routinely screened for HIV.HIV-1 testing is initially done using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) to detect antibodies to HIV-1. Specimens with a non-reactive result from the initial ELISA are considered HIV-negative, unless new exposure to an infected partner or partner of unknown HIV status has occurred. Specimens with a reactive ELISA result are retested in duplicate. If the result of either duplicate test is reactive, the specimen is reported as repeatedly reactive and undergoes confirmatory testing with a more specific supplemental test (e.g., a polymerase chain reaction (PCR), western blot or, less commonly, an immunofluorescence assay (IFA)). Only specimens that are repeatedly reactive by ELISA and positive by IFA or PCR or reactive by western blot are considered HIV-positive and indicative of HIV infection. Specimens that are repeatedly ELISA-reactive occasionally provide an indeterminate western blot result, which may be either an incomplete antibody response to HIV in an infected person or nonspecific reactions in an uninfected person. Although IFA can be used to confirm infection in these ambiguous cases, this assay is not widely used.