Jeff McElhaney has a post at Advertising Age commemorating World AIDS Day titled “An Unhappy 25th on World AIDS Day.” Here is an excerpt:

By my count, AIDS, you’re older than you claim: You were first reported to the U.S Centers for Disease Control in 1981 after five gay men in Los Angeles came down with a rare form of pneumonia. When several more gay men developed the even rarer Kaposi’s sarcoma, the media labeled you GRID for “gay-related immune deficiency.” Then the CDC showed a better sense of branding or humor or something and dubbed you “The 4H Disease” since you’d broadened your tastes to include not only homosexuals but Haitians, hemophiliacs and heroin users. But ambitious young microbe that you were, you expanded your demographic yet again, so the 4H moniker never stuck. (I don’t know who was more relieved about that; the four H audiences in the acronym or the national 4-H youth organization.)

By 1983, the name AIDS for acquired immune deficiency syndrome started catching on — but sadly, not as fast as people were catching you — and in 1984 the retrovirus that causes you was finally identified and soon dubbed HIV (for human immunodeficiency virus).

I remember vividly when you and I first came face-to-face: I had just experienced my first male/male sexual encounter on a Friday night during my junior year at college. The following Monday evening I was blissfully shopping for groceries, and there you were in the checkout lane — staring over at me from the cover of one of the big weekly newsmagazines, cooing, “The New Gay Cancer.”

(Hat tip to the Daily Dish.)