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.
There are at least a couple of plagues in the Bible which are earlier than the Athenian plague: one in the lifetime of Moses (Numbers 16:48), another in the reign of King David (2 Samuel 24:15).
I've found that many blacks also believe we never went to the moon. That the landing was done in a Movie Studio. I've had that argument a few times...
So much for the Bill Cosby theory that the US created AIDS to kill off Blacks.. Ahh well..
Of course anyone who has studied the subject for more than 5 minutes knows there are plenty of examples of a disease crossing between species (consider for example the sources of our various strains of influenza).
Cosby is just endulging in racial/ethnic groupthink. His type won't believe this story because he already dismisses "white" doctors as Mengele-wannabes; hence he disregards the source.
Of course Cosby knows nothing of the contemporary state of bioengineering (anyway, he only played a doctor on TV; not that most doctors know anything about bioengineering, either), ortherwise he would know that the kind of genetic engineering he is talking about is decades, if not centuries, in the future. No one can do what he is claiming we can do, nor could someone "hide the evidence" afterwards: the virus itself would give away the fact that it was different from natural viruses.
I have never heard that before.
You never heard it before because this person is mistaken or confused.
Bubonic plague originated somewhere in Asia and spread westwards into Europe. Historians can trace the progress of the disease as it moved from city to city and town to town: it did not come from North America; the idea is absurd. Bubonic plague did not exist in NA at the time, and if it had, the only way to spread it would have been from indians/eskimoes --> to the tiny viking colony in Greenland --> to Europe. In any case, where is the evidence? Needless to say, there is none.
All the evidence clearly shows the plague moving westwards across Eurasian. It did not move eastwards across Eurasia. Ergo, it did not come from North America.
In fact, the Americas were remarkably disease free in precolumbian times. Even syphilis, which was once thought to have originated in America and been introduced into Europe after Columbus, turns out to have existed in Europe centuries before Columbus; the Indians did have a very mild version of syphilis which was a mere skin disease and hardly noticeable.
The Europeans introduced the nasty, deadly strain to North America, based on evidence from precolumbian indian remains, and medieval European remains. They found quite a few medieval European skulls with the kind of pockmarking left by syphilis. There was a PBS special about this, a few years ago (warning: some of the graphics are revolting...full blown syphilis is not pretty).
He really said that? If so, what a turd he is
Ok, since you morons cannot seem to search the Internet, after I finished my dinner I took a little look myself:
"Bill Cosby stated his belief that AIDS was man-made on CNN, Thanksgiving 1991. Polls show two-thirds of African Americans believe AIDS to be man-made." URL:
http://www.netowne.com/conspiracy/konformist/manmadeaids.htm
Here was a reader that stated the same thing to Horowitz:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/inyourface/1998/iyf-camille7-98.htm
This page claims:
In the December 4, 1991 edition of The New York Post, comedian Bill Cosby said that AIDS was "started by human beings to get after certain people they don't like."
Also includes people saying stuff similiar like Spike Lee:
http://www.grandconspiracy.com/article-cd002.html
I went to the NYT site to research this, but their Archive search engine only goes back to 1996.
http://aidsbiowar.com/page2.htm
http://www.disinfo.com/pages/article/id1822/pg1/
Hey, here is an ENTIRE book on it, even quoting Cosby:
". Physicians like Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Robert Strecker, Alan Cantwell Jr., and celebrities like Bill Cosby, Spike Lee and Steven Segal all believe AIDS is man-made."
http://www.christiananders.net/aidse.htm
Is this enough or do I have to waste more time on people who never actually read the news? Granted, some of these are not real sources, just talk, but I think there is a common consensus here, he stated it in the NYT and on CNN, and is quoted amongst many AIDS conspiracies...
If the disease is so rare among chimpanzees, and so hard to spread, how does it survive at all to be passed to more chimps?
You must have read a different story. It did not say that it was either rare or hard to spread amongst chimps; it said it was a much milder strain then human HIV, and that the chimps had built up an immunity to it. Since it is so harmless to chimps, it is spread easily between chimps.
However, they also don't think that the particular strain they are looking at is the culprit for the chimp-to-human jump. Considering that explosive human population growth in Africa has wiped out a lot of chimp habitat already, it could be that the chimp populations which hosted the original AIDS virus have already been wiped out by hunters/poachers and by farmland expansion wiping out their habitat. If that is the case, then we are not going to find the original AIDS "in the wild" anymore.
Ok, since you morons cannot seem to search the Internet, after I finished my dinner I took a little look myself:
LOL! Give 'em hell.
Reading this thread, I have come to the conclusion (well, I already knew...) that an alarming percentage of freepers don't understand even basic science, don't know how to research or weigh evidence objectively, don't understand even the basic facts of history, the historian's method, or historiography, and are given to swallowing whole any old theory or fantasy that comes along, provided it strokes their prejudices (whatever these may be). In this regard they are not that different from Cosby himself.
Do you have a source for this? I have about 100 others that say the following or something very similar.
Bubonic Plague - a bacterial infection, transmitted from the flea bite of an infected rat to humans. Symptoms include high fever, chills, weakness, and enlarged lymph nodes that turn black (hence the name "The Black Death.) The Plague originated in China and was spread to Western Asia and Europe because China was one of the busiest trading nations. This devastating disease killed 1/3 of Europe's population over a five year period. Though the plague no longer exists, the basic elements of transmission do making future epidemics a possibility. Preventative measures are the proper disposal of garbage and protecting household animals from flea infestation.
From The American Museum of Natural History
You need to check your fact sources, or your brain, one of them has a short circuit. Or are you just a contrarian?
Bill Cosby is a racist idiot who has never had a original thought in his life. He gave Twawna Bradley a 20 or 30 grand braclet to show "black solidarity" or some such nonsense. He's a "Doctor" because a university wanted to kiss some black ass,and he seemed to be both popular and harmless.
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