ABSTRACT
More than ten years have elapsed since AIDS was first reported. On 5 June 1981 the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported five cases of a rare pneumonia among young homosexual men living in Los Angeles. A month later, CDC reported a further ten cases of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia and twenty-six cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. By the end of 1981 the number had reached 257. Ten years on, that figure has increased more than a thousand-fold, and cases of AIDS have been reported in almost every country. There are over a million cases of AIDS world-wide, and by the middle of the next century this number will have risen to 18.3 million (Chin et al. 1990). Alongside the rapid advances over the decade in the fields of epidemiology, virology, immunology, clinical management, nursing care, clinical therapy and prophylaxis, there has been a supreme effort to understand more about the psychosocial sequelae of HIV disease and to translate that comprehension into counselling and psychological support for those affected.
