Posted on 01/17/2002 12:38:00 PM PST by Outraged At FLA
Here is some of what is posted on the page:
Jan. 17 — The chimpanzee version of the AIDS virus appears to be extremely rare in wild chimps, which suggests the apes evolved a way to deal with the killer virus generations ago, researchers said on Thursday. The study also confirmed earlier theories that AIDS passed to humans from chimps in Central Africa, they said
SCIENTISTS HAVE long known nonhuman primates carry their own version of the AIDS virus. But so far, it has been found only in captive chimpanzees. No one knows how prevalent or geographically or genetically diverse the virus is in chimps in the wild.
The new study is the first to find an HIV-like virus in a wild chimp. And the chimp was found in a different part of Africa than they researchers had suspected.
This particular type of chimp in Tanzania could not be the source for human AIDS, because the viral strain the researchers found is too genetically different.
But now that they’ve proved virus testing can be successful in the jungle without disturbing the endangered species, the scientists are beginning the next key step: tracking different chimps in an even more remote part of Africa, where the virus is thought to have jumped from animals to man.
The research, published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, involved chimp experts including Jane Goodall, who has studied the animals for 40 years, and groups working in Central and West Africa.
THE ORIGINS OF AIDS
“It obviously confirms and extends the theory on the origin of AIDS,” said Beatrice Hahn of the University of Alabama, who published a theory in 2000 of the origin of HIV in chimps and who led this week’s study.
The report is important because it proves Hahn’s team developed “a very good way to, without invading or disturbing ecologically, study the evolution of the virus in this species,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the National Institutes of Health’s leading AIDS expert. “It’s part of the big picture of really tracking down the origin.”
“To find this virus for the first time in the wild opens a window of opportunity,” added Hahn’s co-author, George Shaw of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
The closest relatives of the human AIDS virus are those infecting chimps in West Central and not in East Africa, Hahn said.
There are three different groups of HIV in humans, and while it is widely accepted that people probably caught the virus from chimps — probably by hunting and eating them — it was not known if several different subspecies of chimps living in different parts of Africa had perhaps passed on the virus independently.
Hahn first determined that HIV originated in chimps by testing the blood of a captive female, who lived with the chimp simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) for decades until her death from other causes.
Unlike human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), SIV does not have any apparent ill-effects on chimps.
But most captive chimps come from a small group of West African chimps. “We knew that if the study were to make sense, we had to look in the wild,” Hahn said in a telephone interview.
“The chimp range is huge. We had only a teeny little bit of information from captive chimps from one corner of Africa.”
But this posed a problem.
NEED FOR GENTLE TESTS
“We had to think long and hard ... given that chimps are so endangered. We had to look for noninvasive way of screening.”
To do that, they took tests that find antibodies to the virus in human urine samples and adapted them to use on chimp leavings in the forest. Then they teamed up with primatologists studying wild chimps that had come to tolerate their presence.
“We said ‘Listen, we would really like to do this screening — would you be willing to collect fecal and urine samples for us?,”’ Hahn said.
They worked with groups at the Gombe Research Center in Tanzania, in Uganda and in the Tai forest of Ivory Coast.
“We documented that this can be done, that you can study these chimpanzees in the wild without touching them, without bothering them,” Hahn said.
They screened 58 chimps and found just one infected with SIV — a healthy 23-year-old male in the Goodall colony in Tanzania. That’s farther east than tests on captive chimps had led scientists to believe the virus extended.
But the virus he was infected with was genetically very distant from human HIV.
This led Hahn to an interesting thought.
“The individual in Gombe is perfectly healthy. He is a young male in his prime. There is no indication that he is suffering from anything,” she said.
SIV may be a very old disease in chimps she said — unlike HIV, which probably first appeared in this century.
“Chimps may have 10,000 years of living with this virus,” Hahn said. “It may have been pathogenic at first, but evolution bred that out.”
In other words, the most deadly virus would kill its host early, while less deadly versions would survive for longer in longer-lived hosts.
“Chimps probably went through something several thousand years ago that we are going through now and they somehow learned how to handle it. They are at a point where we want to be — but we don’t want to wait 10,000 years.”
Chimps are between 98 and 99 percent genetically identical to humans, so the hope is they can be studied to find ways to make AIDS less deadly in people.
The chimp’s viral strain clearly isn’t very virulent — none of his sexual partners is infected, Hahn said. By studying why, maybe “we can get some clues that will help us combat HIV better in humans,” she said.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
Did Bill Cosby say this? If so, then why is the U.S. working on a vaccine? Doesn't make sense to create a virus to wipe the mout and then create a vaccine.
I've heard of the lunatic theory, but not that Bill Cosby endorsed it. Do you have a source? Anyone?
In other words, they still don't know.
Hint: God will not be mocked.
No. Rape, incest, child molestation is the norm over there. They spread the plague via their liberal, literally, sexual perversion. A man can grab a woman and rape her on the street. No one stops him or even notices.
With Planned Parenthood International, there is no need for a killer virus. Wonder if Cosby supports their activities in Africa.
78% of abortion clinics in America are located in minority areas.
Bawahahahahahahahahah!
Best not to share your banana with goats either.
Here's a translation of the mishmash in this article - somebody has found SIV (not HIV) in wild chimps in East Africa, when SIV is normally only found in simians in West Africa. That's it.
“It obviously confirms and extends the theory on the origin of AIDS,” said Beatrice Hahn of the University of Alabama,
This is simply not the case. There is no indication whatever that intraspecies transmission of the virus is either recent or for that matter even a fact - it's a theory, and the evidence is not complete. This study has nothing to do with intraspecies transmission of anything.
"To find this virus for the first time in the wild opens a window of opportunity,” added Hahn’s co-author, George Shaw of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
This is not the first time it's been found "in the wild," that's where they found it in the first place. It's the first time it's been found that far east.
Let's pray that they were misquoted - if not, Cosby has a better chance at the Nobel than these folks.
Six hundred and fifty years ago, the Black Death was stalking Europe. It arrived on ships from Asia, carried by fleas that had infected rats on board the ships. Before it burned itself out, the epidemic had killed about a third of the European population.
Today, another plague - AIDS - has ravaged the world. Although it seems very different from the Black Death, there is one eerie similarity. Both the Black Death bacteria, Yersinia pestis, and HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, home in on macrophages, which are scavenger white blood cells of the immune system.
Now, in a provocative report, scientists at the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Md., say they have found that a genetic mutation that protects against the AIDS virus, by preventing the virus from entering macrophages, emerged in Europe around the time of the Black Death. And, they have found, this AIDS resistance gene is astonishingly common in people whose ancestors lived in areas of Europe that were ravaged by the Black Death.
The HIV resistance gene destroys a protein, called CCR5, that pokes out of the surface of macrophages, the large white blood cells that can engulf and kill viruses and bacteria.
Scientists have discovered that when HIV infects a person, the virus goes straight to the white blood cells and in particular the macrophages, latches onto CCR5 and another protein, CD4, to hoist itself inside. It lives there for about a decade, throwing off billions of genetic variants. Eventually it makes a variant that can get into another type of white blood cell, the T cells. Then the infected person's immune system starts to decline, and the terrible symptoms of AIDS appear.
People who inherit two copies of the HIV resistance gene can only be infected with HIV if they happen to come in contact with a virus from someone in the late stages of infection, when the virus can go straight for the T cells, said Dr. Stephen J. O'Brien, who is chief of the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity at the cancer institute.
O'Brien and others have found that 10 percent of Caucasians have a copy of the gene, which slows the progress of HIV infections by several years, and one percent have two copies, which provides nearly complete immunity to HIV.
The HIV resistance gene is most common among British and other northern European people, and declines in frequency further south. Thus, it is present in almost 14 percent of Swedes but appears in only about 5 percent of Italians and is absent in Saudi Arabia. It is absent in Africans, American Indians and Asians. The gene emerged in the Caucasian population long after Caucasians split from Asians, which was about 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, O'Brien said. And so, although the bubonic plague began in Asia, the HIV resistance gene is not there.
By GINA KOLATA N.Y. Times, May 26, 1998
I remember when it was a big sotry, and Limbaugh was talking about it, but as for sources, I have only one that I just quickly searched on the Net (and it is not that great):
"Bill Cosby saying that AIDS was "started by human beings to get after certain people they don't like." "
http://www.grandconspiracy.com/synopsis.html
But, you could probably find more just by doing a "cosby aids" search. I remember in fact seeing it on the news here in NY (I think Fox5) when it came out.
I am in the middle of cooking dinner or I could probably search you out a better source. :P
Do you seriously suppose that for the past 5 million years in Africa, all human males consistently turned this down? How about the last FIFTY years? Five, anyone?
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