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This disease was around a long time before the “gay movement” took off. It has been spread around the world because of two things: interconinental air travel and looser morals.

I've done some pretty extensive (for a non MD) research on this, and I'm still baffled. I corresponded with Tom Bethell of the Hoover Institution, who adheres to the school that says there is no such thing as "AIDs"---or, more accurately, that AIDs is a medically-concocted term to describe other diseases accompanied by a HIV marker, which, in their view, is only a passenger or fellow traveler. Hence the abundant evidence (Magic Johnson, for example) that everyone with HIV does not show AIDs. This is the Peter Duesberg theory. Duesberg has long been thought of as "out there" and crazy, but recently a lot of studies (certainly not the majority) have added some credence to his theory.

However, not long ago I watched a documentary based on a book by Peter Hooper, a journalist who has followed AIDs for as long as it's been around. His investigations showed a very strong correlation between the outbreak of AIDs and the introduction of one specific type of oral polio vaccine in the late 1950s. This vaccine used chimpanzee (not green monkey) tissue that did contain SIV, and he argues---with incredible levels of medical sophistication---that the outbreak in Africa of AIDs correlates perfectly with the application of this, but only this, particular OPV.

Around 2000, Hooper's charges grew so intense and the reaction so serious that there was a medical panel in Britain set up to examine them. Nothing was concluded, but one of the witnesses who introduced the vaccine was caught in a bold-faced lie when he said he had never used chimpanzees at all, yet there are witnesses on record and photographic/film evidence of chimpanzees at the facility being tested, killed, and cut up for their kidneys.

According to Hooper, once it was "out there," it spread by all the methods we know---sex and drug use, mostly. This was a powerful revision of the "cut hunter"/"sex with monkeys" theory, which I always thought was lame, because AIDs wouldn't have waited until the 20th century to show up.

ONLY Hooper's theory explains the timing of the outbreak in Africa---but only Deusberg's theory explains why some (many?) who have HIV do not have AIDs. They can't both be right. But either would have huge implications for treatment and policy regarding AIDs.

Postscript: Just a few years ago, Africa held a big AIDs conference where, for the first time, the president of South Africa insisted that the Deusberg people at least be permitted to have equal time.

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.