The Nation - News from Oct. 26, 1987

Researchers in St. Louis have identified AIDS as the likely cause of death in the case of a teen-age boy who died in 1969, a decade earlier than the first AIDS death believed to have occurred in the United States, a newspaper reported. The boy, a 15-year-old identified as “Robert R.,” might have been homosexual but where he picked up the fatal disease is a mystery, the Chicago Tribune reported in a copyrighted article. Research scientists at Washington University and elsewhere in St. Louis were puzzled about the boy’s death and froze tissue and fluid samples. An initial test has confirmed exposure to the virus that causes AIDS and another test is scheduled this week to confirm it, the newspaper said. The earliest known case of acquired immune deficiency syndrome in the United States previously had been that of a homosexual security guard in New York in 1979.