High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The history of HIV/AIDS in the United States began in about 1969, when HIV likely entered the United States through a single infected immigrant from Haiti. In the late 1970s (i.e. 1978) and early 1980s, doctors in Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco began seeing young men with Kaposi`s Sarcoma, a cancer usually associated with elderly men of Mediterranean ethnicity.