Posted on 10/29/2007 5:11:51 PM PDT by dennisw
AIDS virus invaded U.S. from Haiti: study By Will Dunham 2 hours, 28 minutes ago
The AIDS virus invaded the United States in about 1969 from Haiti, carried most likely by a single infected immigrant who set the stage for it to sweep the world in a tragic epidemic, scientists said on Monday.
Michael Worobey, a University of Arizona evolutionary biologist, said the 1969 U.S. entry date is earlier than some experts had believed.
The timeline laid out in the study led by Worobey indicates that HIV infections were occurring in the United States for roughly 12 years before AIDS was first recognized by scientists as a disease in 1981. Many people had died by that point.
"It is somehow chilling to know it was probably circulating for so long under our noses," Worobey said in a telephone interview.
The researchers conducted a genetic analysis of stored blood samples from early AIDS patients to determine when the human immunodeficiency virus first entered the United States.
They found that HIV was brought to Haiti by an infected person from central Africa in about 1966, which matches earlier estimates, and then came to the United States in about 1969.
The researchers think an unknown single infected Haitian immigrant arrived in a large city like Miami or New York, and the virus circulated for years -- first in the U.S. population and then to other nations.
It can take several years after infection for a person to develop AIDS, a disease that ravages the immune system.
DISEASE MULTIPLIES
"That one infection would have become two, and then it doubles again and the two becomes four," Worobey said. "So you have a period -- probably a fair number of years -- where you're dealing with probably fewer than a hundred people who are infected.
"And then, as with epidemic expansion, at some point the hundred becomes 200, you start getting into thousands, tens of thousands. And then quite rapidly you can be up into the hundreds of thousands of infections that were probably already there before AIDS was recognized in the early 1980s."
The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The path the virus traveled as it jumped from nation to nation has long been debated by scientists.
The University of Miami's Dr. Arthur Pitchenik, a co-author of the study, had seen Haitian immigrants in Miami as early as 1979 with a mystery illness that turned out to be AIDS. He knew the government long had stored some of their blood samples.
The researchers analyzed samples from five of these Haitian immigrants dating from 1982 and 1983. They also looked at genetic data from 117 more early AIDS patients from around the world.
This genetic analysis allowed the scientists to calibrate the molecular clock of the strain of HIV that has spread most widely, and calculated when it arrived first in Haiti from Africa and then in the United States.
The researchers virtually ruled out the possibility that HIV had come directly to the United States from Africa, setting a 99.8 percent probability that Haiti was the steppingstone.
"I think that it gives us more clear insight into the history of it (the AIDS epidemic) and what path the virus took -- and hard objective evidence, not just armchair thinking," Pitchenik said in a telephone interview.
Studies suggest the virus first entered the human population in about 1930 in central Africa, probably when people slaughtered infected chimpanzees for meat. AIDS has killed more than 25 million people and about 40 million others are infected with HIV.
I once read that Haiti was,for years,a favorite vacation destination for a certain type of sexual deviant living in the US.
The joys of globalism.
The next plague will make AIDS look small.
This one-world crap is going to victimize a lot of people soon, I bet.
The TB case in Mexico is just one example of the Russian roulette we’re playing these days.
I thought everyone already knew this!
Globalism has been around for quite some time. The Black Plague, for instance, was an import from the east. The Spanish explorers brought diseases that decimated the populations of the Americas from 1500-1600.
My microbiology professor in college (mid-eighties) used to describe the risk factors for AIDS with the 4H’s: Homosexual, Hepatitis, Haitian, and/or Hemophiliac.
I’m with you. I don’t need no steenking study. Just look at newspapers in 1980s It was the 3-H disease (Haitian, Homosexual or Hemophiliac), or the “Gay Plague”. The book “And the Band Played On” is by or about the Gay Cabin Attendant who was infected and spread it far and wide. This story says one single Haitian came to USA and therefrom is spread across the globe. Lie. It started in Africa where it is still rampant. Some think it mutated from apes or monkeys.
The moral of the story is don’t boink monkeys?
Turns out, Tricky Dick really started the ball rolling.
Yeah. I had two friends die of it before it had a name. Thank God I’m straight.
And the point of this is...??
Bingo.
Yeah, I thought the jihadists believe Jewish doctors deliberately introduced the virus into the African and Moslem nations.
I’ve long suspected that he actually died of AIDs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Act_of_1965
Apparently Ted Kennedy is responsible for the entire spread of AIDS in the USA.
Basically, gays from the US would hit Haiti and other South American LDCs and rent a boy for the week, or whatever.
This AP story gives and overview and was published more than 20 years ago on October 26, 1987
LEAD: Doctors believe a St. Louis teen-ager who died in 1969 was infected with the virus that causes AIDS, according to a newspaper report. A finding of AIDS in 1969, if confirmed, would be far earlier than the earliest known cases, identified in the late 1970’s in New York City and California.
Doctors believe a St. Louis teen-ager who died in 1969 was infected with the virus that causes AIDS, according to a newspaper report. A finding of AIDS in 1969, if confirmed, would be far earlier than the earliest known cases, identified in the late 1970’s in New York City and California.
Doctors were so perplexed by the death of the 15-year-old patient, identified only as Robert R., that some of them saved samples of his body fluids and tissues for nearly two decades, hoping to find the reasons for his death, The Chicago Tribune reported in its Sunday issue.
Tests on the samples by Dr. Robert Garry of Tulane University Medical School showed with virtual certainty that the virus that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome was present, said a colleague at Tulane, Dr. Arthur Gottlieb. ‘’There’s no question that it’s positive,’’ Dr. Gottlieb said. However, he said tests would be repeated this week to add to the evidence.
It was announced last month at the 11th International Congress of Lymphology in Vienna that tests would be conducted to determine a link to AIDS in the case of Robert R., The article said.
Robert R. died on May 16, 1969, The Tribune said.
AIDS cripples the body’s defenses against disease, leaving the victim prey to lethal infections and certain cancers. Kaposi’s Sacroma Identified
Dr. William Drake, a pathologist who performed an autopsy on Robert R., found small, purplish lesions identified in the autopsy report as Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare form of cancer now considered an almost certain signal of AIDS.
The patient also had a sexually transmitted disease, chlamydia, with virtually no evidence that his immune system was blocking its spread. ‘’The case sure was consistent with some kind of virus knockdown of the immune system,’’ Dr. Drake said.
Robert R. did not give an extensive medical history to his doctors.
‘’He was not a communicative individual,’’ said Dr. Memory Elvin-Lewis, a microbiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, who watched the patient’s decline for more than a year.
According to the autopsy report, Robert R. ‘’dated his physical disability from an instance of sexual relations with a neighborhood girl’’ in St. Louis.
While he was never asked about homosexuality, evidence from the autopsy suggests ‘’he could have been a male prostitute,’’ said Dr. Marlys Hearst Witte, a professor of surgery at the University of Arizona who was closely involved with the case.
AIDS is caused by a virus spread through sexual intercourse, infected hypodermic needles shared by drug abusers, infected blood or blood products and from pregnant women to their fetuses.
An even better story is at: http://www.aegis.com/news/ct/1987/CT871003.html
>>>‘patient zero’ as being an airline steward.
He flew for Air Canada, bus AIDS/SIDA actually goes back much farther than that. His name was something like Gitain Douglas. (I was med reporter back then)
HIV has also been found in a blood smaple that was taken in 1959 in the Congo.
I saw a documentary in which these people were whining about coming to America only to come down with this terrible, unknown disease after they arrived. As soon as AIDS was named, this info disappeared.
I see from this that it came before the Boat People...but I was close.
Why in the world would we allow immigration from a dump like Haiti? How many people are dead because of Third World immigration and sexual deviants?
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