Posted on 06/28/2008 12:10:13 AM PDT by neverdem
MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA--The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1) responsible for most of the AIDS cases in the world infected people approximately 100 years ago, more than 20 years earlier than previously believed, according to findings presented here this week at the Evolution 2008 meeting. Its lesser known cousin, HIV-2, jumped into humans decades later, from a monkey species that carried the virus for just a couple of hundred years, not the millions of years researchers had assumed, according to other research presented at the meeting.
Researchers are trying to pin down the origins of both HIVs to understand how often new human viruses emerge. Both arose from simian immunodeficiency viruses (SIVs) of other primates.
The first clues that researchers were on the wrong track about the SIV that led to HIV-2 came last year. Researchers had assumed that because most monkey species infected with SIV don't get sick, the virus has been coevolving with the primates for millions of years, allowing the host and pathogen to peaceably coexist. If that were the case, the branching of the monkey family tree should match the branching of the SIV tree. But last year, University of Arizona, Tucson, graduate student Joel Wertheim, his adviser, Michael Worobey, and colleagues found that not to be the case for the African green monkey and its SIV. "The work suggested that the virus was not millions of years old," Wertheim said at the meeting.
To better pin down the origin of SIVs, Wertheim then collected samples of the virus from sooty mangabeys in Africa and in U.S. primate centers. (These samples were far more plentiful than virus from African green monkeys.) He compared the genetic sequences in those SIV samples with sequences from the few African green monkey SIV samples he had, as well as to sequences of human HIV-2 and macaque SIV.
Wertheim used a sophisticated computer program to build a family tree based on the degree of differences among the sequences. The analysis also determined when the various strains--branches on this tree--appeared. The sooty mangabey caught its first SIV in 1808, and it jumped into humans 125 years later to become HIV-2, he reported at the meeting.
In the second study, another of Worobey's graduate students, Marlea Gemmel, analyzed HIV-1 genetic material obtained from lymph tissue collected in 1960 from the University of Kinshasa pathology department in the Democratic Republic of the Congo--only the second HIV sequence predating 1976 deciphered to date. Thus far, she has sequenced about 1000 DNA bases, which she has compared with the previously reported sequence of HIV-1 extracted from a frozen blood sample from 1959. Since it entered into humans, HIV-1 has been evolving into different substrains--but the 1960 and 1959 sequences were much more divergent than expected, Gemmel reported at the meeting. "It reflects a long past of diversification before 1960," she said.
By comparing the two sequences with more recent ones, Gemmel was able to show that HIV-1 first entered humans about 1908, not 1931, as earlier analyses with just the 1959 sample found. Her analysis also indicates that the virus existed in low levels in humans until the middle of the 20th century. "That matches the rise of population centers," Gemmel explained, suggesting that urbanization around that time paved the way for the AIDS epidemic.
Experts are impressed by both findings. The Worobey group is "applying state-of-the-art tools and controlling for a lot of important issues" in shedding light on the origins of the AIDS epidemic, says John Logsdon Jr., an evolutionary biologist at the University of Iowa, Iowa City. These studies are also helping us understand how HIV works, says David Hillis, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Texas, Austin. For example, AIDS experts have assumed that the disease is so severe in humans--yet less so in most monkeys--because humans have not had the time to evolve the proper defenses against the virus that many other primates have. "But the origins are around the same order of magnitude," and still the monkeys don't get sick, says Hillis. "It points out that there are other directions we need to go to understand [virulence]."
So it wasn’t the CIA that created the virus? Since it was 100 years ago, perhaps it was James West and Artemus Gordon that made it.
In a book that I read (forgot the title) they found HIV in a frozen blood sample from a Norwegian sailor who died in 1960. Apparently he caught it from a prostitute in an African port. The doctors saved the blood sample because he died so quickly from an unknown disease.
Hepatitis C affects and KILLS more people than HIV or AIDS and is the leading cause for liver transplants...and yet, you never hear about it.
Squeaky wheels = grease.
Maybe because most of Hep C victims (at least in the US) are straight white guys in their 30’s, 40’s and 50’s?
.....Gay monkeys?...
Queer sooty mangabeys
Apparently not all monkey are perverted
I remember reading a newspaper article about a black teenager in St. Louis who was dying from a mysterious illness (in the 1960s, I think). The doctors saved a sample of his blood and/or tissue, and it was eventually determined that the teenager had had AIDS.
But those chimps are so cute!
Typical homosexual behavior includes regular contact with fecal matter from oneself and from sexual partners, tragically reversing several centuries of learning about cleanliness, and thus several centuries of growing lifespan. Homosexual behavior makes no more sense than playing in the toilet.
All available evidence indicates that the lifespan of practicing homosexual persons is drastically shortened by their behavior. No reliable study indicates otherwise. The lifespan topic is taboo among homosexual advocates because the evidence is so damaging to their case.
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Funny, there was no epidemic and no resulting massive campaign for condom use one hundred years ago. :') |
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The African National Congress, the regime still in power in South Africa, was sponsored by Moscow during the Cold War as I'm pretty sure you know. I wouldn't let these clowns have any credibility.
Well, regardless of who is sponsoring them, they are the first group to “look outside the box.” Given what we do, and don’t, know for sure about AIDs, it can’t hurt.
These guys are looking deeply into the origins of the HIV virus. Their time would be better spent trying to find where in the vast literature addressing this ubiquitous retrovirus that it is actually shown scientifically that HIV is the cause of AIDS.
But of course that would be a waste of time also, because that proof is not to be found in the scientific literature. It is just "a truth" that we are supposed to accept because "everyone knows it is so".
Diagnosis of HIV-1 Infection in Children Younger Than 18 Months in the United States
Do you need more citations about the on the job infection of health care professionals, the reduction in mother to child transmission, aka vertical transmission, by giving the mother antiretroviral drugs around the expected birth of the kids. Just because it doesn't behave like traditional viruses, doesn't mean it isn't real. We don't know what we don't know.
I wouldn't be surprised, but do you have a link?
I'm sure HIV is contagious. And anti-viral drugs could help reduce HIV infections. And AIDS is real. That is all well and good, but it is not the issue that I addressed.
My issue is simply that I have seen no proof that HIV is the cause of AIDS. Lots of talk. Lots of agreement. Lots of assumptions but no clinical trials or laboratory evidence that anyone infected with HIV and left untreated is doomed to die of AIDS.
Is there any doubt that there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people in this country who are infected with the HIV virus (or at least would show positive on an HIV test if tested) who go through a full and happy life quite ignorant of that fact because they were never tested?
So the challenge is to show that HIV causes AIDS. To do so you need to find a reference in the scientific literature documenting that Koch's Postulates are satisfied for HIV as the cause of AIDS. If you cannot do that (and you can't) then you have no case.
Actually I would interested in such citations if you have them. I tend to think the actual, not the projected, risk to health care professionals has been pretty minor.
Those are good points against the Duesberg theory. Also, there is the fact that Duesberg had “offered” to have himself exposed to HIV, but never seems to have actually done it, always coming up with an excuse. Personally, I lean against Deusberg’s hypothesis and go with the view that it is, in fact, related to HIV, and also tend to think that it was the one strain of Oral Polio Vaccine that introduced SIV into the human population as SIV.
With active hostilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, why does the U.S. military reject HIV antibody positive recruits while otherwise lowering standards for enlistment?
So the challenge is to show that HIV causes AIDS. To do so you need to find a reference in the scientific literature documenting that Koch's Postulates are satisfied for HIV as the cause of AIDS. If you cannot do that (and you can't) then you have no case.
Accidentally exposed healcare workers fulfill Koch's Postulates.
Until the mid-1990s, nobody claimed that HIV had fulfilled Koch's last two postulates. Even today, the proof is not quite perfect. But most scientists believe the evidence is now strong enough to put the case beyond all reasonable doubt.53There is no single scientific paper that proves HIV causes AIDS. Instead there are tens of thousands of papers containing a wide range of evidence that, taken together, make the case overwhelming.
Accidentally exposed healtcare workers fulfill Koch's Postulates.
Update: Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome and Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection Among Health-Care Workers
You cannot fulfill Koch's Postulate with ONE CASE. Just read the summary. That's what it says and I doubt if the article makes any reference to Koch's Postulates (although anything is possible.) This is from the Summary with my emphasis:
"Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) among health-care workers in the United States results primarily from human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infections that occur outside of the health-care setting. However, a small number of health-care workers have been infected with HIV through occupational exposures, and one such worker has developed AIDS after documented seroconversion."
I mean really. ONE WORKER does not equate to satisfying Koch's Postulates.
Because they believe that HIV causes AIDS. That is the view of the U.S. Government. But they can't prove it and they don't bother. We are just all supposed to agree that it's true because that's the "right thing to do".
There is no proof that HIV causes AIDS. None.
There is no single scientific paper that proves HIV causes AIDS. Instead there are tens of thousands of papers containing a wide range of evidence that, taken together, make the case overwhelming.
Well you have made my case quite well. Koch's Postulates are not fulfilled and there is no paper or case study proving HIV causes AIDS.
That's what I told you. We are in agreement.
HIV causes AIDS: Koch's postulates fulfilled.
Those authors beg to differ.
That's what I told you. We are in agreement.
No, we are not.
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