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Epidemiology is the science that studies how diseases occur in a community.
An epidemiologist can tell a great deal about a disease process by looking at the distribution of cases by the epidemiological variables of time, person and place. The distribution of cases by time can be used to follow the course of the epidemic. Although the epidemic was first recognized in the summer of 1981, cases of AIDS probably began to occur in the United States in the late 1970s, probably around 1978. An emerging disease smolders in the human community for some time, sometimes for many years and then circumstances arise by which the disease becomes more disseminated in the population. With HIV, scientists speculate that dissemination was helped by the virus traveling initially from isolated rural communities in Africa to urban areas and subsequently globally.