This man's death was a mystery for more than a decade. Then a young doctor figured out what had killed him and rewrote Australia's medical history in the process.
Doctors noted he had an enlarged spleen and inflamed lymph nodes, but when they performed biopsies on both, neither test revealed much.
He was diagnosed with pneumocystis pneumonia, a rare but serious lung infection that tends to affect people with weakened immune systems. When he died of lung failure in September, seven months after falling ill, there were no contacts for the hospital to call. Then one morning, almost 12 years later, Dr Mayall received a call from a young medical researcher to say he'd discovered the cause of the man's death — and in doing so, had rewritten the early history of HIV/AIDS in Australia.Around the time Harvey was unwell in Sydney, a small cluster of similar, unexplained cases of pneumocystis pneumonia was also surfacing in Los Angeles, California.
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