Robert Rayford

The Rayfords lived in the Old North neighborhood of St. Louis, where the 19th-century brick homes provided affordable housing for several working class African-American families such as their own.

[4] Dr Memory Elvin-Lewis, who was assigned to his case, recalled Rayford's shy and hesitant personality: "He was the typical 15-year-old who is not going to talk to adults, especially when I'm white and he's black.

[6][8] Doctors treating Rayford suspected that he was an underage sex worker and the recipient of receptive anal intercourse, but never considered the possibility of him being a victim of child molestation.

Small purplish lesions were discovered on Rayford's left thigh and in his internal soft tissue, including "of the rectum and anus."

Drake concluded that the lesions were Kaposi's sarcoma, a rare type of cancer which mostly affected elderly men of Mediterranean or Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry,[10] but was almost unheard of among black teenagers.

[13] HIV, originally called "lymphadenopathy-associated virus", or LAV, was first discovered in 1983 and at the time, it was rapidly spreading in the gay male communities of New York City and Los Angeles.

The Western blot test found that antibodies against all nine detectable HIV proteins were present in Rayford's blood.

[3] In a 1990 letter to the scientific journal Nature, Robert F. Garry stated that efforts to directly detect HIV DNA were under way: "Proviral DNA has recently been detected in his tissues by PCR in collaboration with J. Sninsky and S. Kwok (Cetus Corporation, Emeryville, California) but nucleotide sequence analysis is not yet complete".

The abstract argues that laboratory contamination by the HIV IIIB isolate was unlikely, because the DNA testing was done on Rayford's samples without being cultured.

If Rayford was indeed infected with HIV, as one group of researchers claims, the mode of acquisition is assumed to have been through sexual contact.

[2] Rayford is believed to have never ventured into cosmopolitan cities such as New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco, where the HIV-AIDS epidemic was first observed in the United States.