. >> reporter: bobby campell of san francisco and billy walker of new york both suffer from a newly discoveredse which effects homosexual men. >> our best guest is it is somehow related to the gay life-style. >> i was in the fast lane at one time in terms of the way i lived my life, now i am not. >> reporter: researchers know of 413 people that contracted it, in the past year. one-third have died and none of them cured. >> all of us who saw patients in those days shared a sense of desperation as we saw more and more people become affected and there would simply be no hope once they became ill. >> what is killing these people? >> what's killing them is severe, perhaps profound, maybe permanent breakdown of the immune system. caused by either some transmissible infection or combination of environmental exposure. >> right now you gentlemen in atlanta are frantically searching for this agent, if there is one, causing this disease, we certainly wish you luck finding it. >> number one was to figure out what it is. in epidemiology it is who, what, where, why. we have teams of cdc folks to go out, int