Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) is a weekly epidemiological digest for the United States published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A report in the June 5, 1981, issue of the MMWR published the cases of five men in what turned out to be the first report of AIDS to appear in medical literature. , the journal's current editor-in-chief is Frederic E. Shaw, MD, JD, who has served in that role since 2007.

Called "the voice of CDC", MMWR is the main method for publishing "timely, reliable, authoritative, accurate, objective, and useful public health information and recommendations" that have been received by the CDC from state health departments, with each issue covering reports that have been received in the week through Friday, and published on the following Friday. Material published in the MMWR is in the public domain and may be reprinted without permission.

Over the years, MMWR has provided insights into health-related trends, such as the spread of Hepatitis A at attendees of jam band concert tours, several dozen deaths in teens participating in what is called the "choking game" (February 2008), a report about the elevated death rate among fisherman in the Pacific Northwest (April 2008), and improvements in public health after the implementation of municipal smoking bans (January 2009). The initial reports of a novel swine flu virus which led to the 2009 swine flu pandemic were published by MMWR on April 24, 2009.

First report of AIDS

Los Angeles-based general practitioner Joel Weisman and immunologist Michael S. Gottlieb of the UCLA Medical Center had encountered a series of gay male patients with symptoms that appeared to be immune system disorders including significant loss of weight and swollen lymph nodes, accompanied by fever and rashes, in addition to two patients with chronic diarrhea, depressed white blood cell counts and fungal infections. Gottlieb diagnosed these and a number of his other patients as having pneumocystis pneumonia. A report they jointly wrote published in the June 5, 1981, issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, described their patients, "5 young men, all active homosexuals, [who] were treated for biopsy-confirmed Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia at 3 different hospitals in Los Angeles, California" of which "[t]wo of the patients died" by the time of the original report. This notice has been recognized as the first published report marking the official start of the AIDS pandemic and as "the first report on AIDS in the medical literature".