Aids...Where did it come from?

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Reply 40

Unregistered

foolfarian

It wasn't spotted until i think 1976 ish in the young gay men in america (poss new york).

I think it was San Francisco.

Reply 41

Fluffy

The first official HIV report was in 1981 (Patient Zero - a canadian flight attendant - although there are 3 documented cases pre-81, including one in 1976 - a norwegian sailor.

This is also interesting re: polio vaccine link and firsy confirmed HIV sample...

Oldest AIDS Blood Confirmed

By NewsPlanet Staff

SUMMARY: Scientists have found a 1959 HIV+ blood sample that they say proves there was human AIDS in Africa prior to WWII -- and before the widely suspected "bad" polio vaccine was given.

An international team headed by Dr. David Ho of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center is reporting in the distinguished journal "Nature" this week (February 5 issue) their authenticated identification of HIV in a blood sample from 1959 -- and the structure of this oldest-known example of the virus leads them to believe that the history of HIV in humans extends back to before World War II. The blood was taken from a Bantu man from what's now the Democratic Republic of Congo as part of a study that collected more than 1,200 samples over 13 years. Researchers took particular care that this find would not become contaminated, as a previous 1959 sample from a British sail! or which Ho had put forward ultimately proved to be.

The current sample is identified as HIV-1, the strain affecting the larger number of people in the world today. The projection of HIV's natural history backwards more than a decade is based on the degree of genetic divergence which HIV-2 shows from HIV-1 and from the 1959 sample, all of which presumably had some common ancestor. The estimate of time for the divergence to take place is somewhat speculative, particularly since there are no other samples from that time period for comparison.

The discovery is an important one in understanding the still-mysterious natural history of the worldwide pandemic. As Dr. Simon Wain-Hobson of the Pasteur Institute writes in a commentary in "Nature," the sample confirms that HIV "had a human history before it went global." While it still supports the popular notion that HIV began as a monkey virus which somehow jumped the species barrier to infect humans, it negates speculation that the disease began with contaminated polio vaccine given to 300,000 people in the former Zaire in 1959, suggesting instead that the "jump" from monkeys came decades before.