Posted on 11/25/2004 5:09:40 PM PST by SunkenCiv
How did HIV originate? Four ideas are under serious consideration. One is quite controversial—the notion that the progenitor virus (which in the case of HIV-1 is found in chimpanzees) crossed into humans through a large-scale trial of an experimental oral polio vaccine carried out in the Belgian Congo between 1957 and 1960. The main competing theory is that the simian progenitor virus passed to humans through cuts as someone was hunting or butchering a chimpanzee (or, in the case of HIV-2, a type of West African monkey called the sooty mangabey). The difficulty with the cut-hunter concept is that, taken alone, it does not explain why the simian progenitor virus did not make the jump to humans before the middle of the 20th century (and then, why it did so multiple times). To answer that riddle, two modifications have been proposed. Both suggest that accidental blood-to-blood contact accounts for how these simian viruses first infected people and that specific human actions allowed them to spread in the population and eventually mutate to HIV, sparking the current pandemic. One hypothesis implicates the widespread reuse of disposable syringes, which were introduced during the 1950s. The other focuses on the disruptions of the colonial era, a time when Europeans brutalized the natives of Central Africa, resulting in the deaths of millions and forcing large-scale population shifts—all the while subjecting many Africans to medical treatments that probably involved the reuse of unsterilized syringes. Moore, an anthropologist and an author of the last of these theories, gives a balanced account of the various possibilities.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanscientist.org ...
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LO< but that STILL doesn't explain the "cross over" of HIV until the late 20th century.
And this doesn't give any detail about how it got from chimps to humans during this trial. This sounds like that crazy guy at the UN who keeps claiming the CIA or somebody came up with AIDS as a way of destroying blacks.
How do you explain about an AIDS case in the 1950s? I read in The Hot Zone, that HIV may have came from an island in Lake Victoria in Uganda. The epicenter is the northwestern shore of Lake Victoria.
I am referring to the one in St Louis.
Hey, I don't explain 'em, I only quote 'em. ;')
A friend who worked at a local AIDS resource center claimed that tissue samples surviving from puzzling autopsies had pushed the AIDS diagnosis (ex post facto) back to 1920, or some such. I think that is just a wacky myth, and have my doubts that any such study has ever been done. I guess I could go check...
Anyway, the first diagnosis of AIDS took place around 20-25 years ago, and AFAIK there's no solid, unrefuted evidence to justify any earlier diagnosis.
Still lookin'.How Long Has Virus Been Stalking Victims?It was the spring of 1959... an anonymous resident of Kinshasa, Zaire, was having his AIDS-infected blood drawn for posterity, while in the industrial city of Manchester, England an ailing British sailor was presenting himself to doctors at the Royal Infirmary. For nearly two years, the young sailor said, he had suffered from a variety of puzzling symptoms, including strange purplish lesions on his back and shoulders. Then, just before Christmas of 1958, his condition had taken a turn for the worse. The slightest exertion left him breathless, and he had come down with a bad case of "night sweats." He began losing weight at an alarming rate, experienced unremitting fatigue and developed a spiking fever. The sailor grew steadily weaker until, in August of 1959, he died. An autopsy found evidence of pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), an infection of the lung that was then almost unheard of in adults... A second case recorded in 1959 was closer to home, but no less mysterious. This time the subject was a 48-year-old shipping clerk for a Manhattan garment manufacturer who had come to New York City from his native Haiti three decades before. Shortly after falling ill, the clerk developed many of the same symptoms as the sailor: shortness of breath, loss of weight, headache, sore throat and malaise, continuous fatigue and profuse night sweats. Finally he died. Once again, PCP proved to be the cause of death-and no underlying disease or immune deficiency could be found... AIDS may have been responsible for otherwise inexplicable deaths going back 30 years or more.
by John Crewdson
Chicago Tribune
Sunday October 25, 1987
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I read about it in National Geographic Magazine. It was an early 1990s issue.
an old-style, but related topic:
The Origin of AIDS - (the best article I've read on this subject)
Culture/Society News
Source: www.sfgate.com
Published: Sunday, January 14, 2001 Author: William Carlsen
Posted on 01/15/2001 09:55:50 PST by my_pointy_head_is_sharp
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a6339a664b5.htm
HIV vaccine breakthrough reported
PlanetOut Network ^ | Wednesday, November 17, 2004 | Christopher Curtis
Posted on 11/18/2004 11:34:14 PM PST by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1283614/posts
We should have destroyed the rain forest when we had the chance.
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