1959

History of HIV/AIDS

A 1959 Kinshasa blood sample preserves the earliest confirmed HIV-1 infection

No death is on the record here. The listing turns a vial of archived plasma into a deathbed, and the scientific reports document neither a diagnosis nor a date of death.

What was actually collected

In early 1959, researchers obtained a plasma sample from an adult Bantu man living in Léopoldville, Belgian Congo — now Kinshasa. The specimen was later designated L70, and the viral sequence recovered from it ZR59.

The blood was drawn during population-genetic and medical research. The surviving publications identify no patient-specific illness or clinical event behind this particular draw, and no exact collection day beyond "early 1959."

The consulted reports do not say the man died that year. His identity and subsequent life are unknown.

Found four decades later

Nothing was recognized as an HIV event at the time. The plasma was archived, and only retrospective testing revealed what it held: Andre Nahmias and colleagues reported antibody reactivity in 1986, and Tuofu Zhu's team recovered HIV-1 RNA in the 1990s.

Of 1,213 archival African plasma samples in the reported serological survey, exactly one was confirmed reactive by multiple HIV-1 tests. Four short RNA fragments were recovered from it.

Phylogenetic testing authenticated ZR59 as the oldest confirmed HIV-1 infection known from an archival human specimen.

What "first" can and cannot mean here

Oldest known infection means the oldest confirmed archival specimen — not the first human ever infected. ZR59 shows that HIV-1 already existed and had diversified; it does not identify the person in whom the virus crossed into humans.

The 1959 material was plasma from a man. The well-known archival lymph-node biopsy is a different specimen, taken from a woman in Léopoldville in 1960, and the genetic distance between the two showed the virus had been diversifying for decades before AIDS was recognized.

Research places a probable chimpanzee reservoir in southeastern Cameroon, separate from Kinshasa's later role as a focus of early human transmission.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 7 sources not yet audited Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree about when this happened.

What the sources leave uncertain

No exact collection day is reported beyond “early 1959.”
The event as listed is unsupported: there is no evidence that the donor died in 1959.
“Oldest known infection” means the oldest confirmed archival specimen, not the first human ever infected.
A purported 1959 HIV case involving a Manchester sailor who died that year was later judged unconfirmed; it is separate from ZR59.