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AIDS Virus Now Estimated To Be 100 Years Old
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Oct 01, 2008 01:18 PM
from the younger-than-harley-davidson dept.
from the younger-than-harley-davidson dept.
ChazeFroy writes "A new study estimates that the AIDS virus, HIV, started to circulate in the human population between 1884 and 1924, with a more focused estimate at 1908. This is much earlier than the previously-held estimate of 1930. 'The new result is "not a monumental shift, but it means the virus was circulating under our radar even longer than we knew," says Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, an author of the new work.' The article also speculates that HIV first began to spread in Kinshasa, Congo."
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Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm skeptical. How could a disease with such a long incubation period not be recognized for over a century? It's not like needles or anal sex were invented in 1965. And then in a period of a few years become a worldwide epidemic? Yeah, I RTFA but I'm not buying the "city" hypothesis; it's not like people in the country don't have anal sex.
Two notes though, the first serious and the second humorous (humoroidous).
When I was in Thailand in the USAF from Aug. 1973 to Aug 1974, there were rumors of a sexually transmitted disease that was being hushed up by the government. The rumor had it that this disease was fatal and had no cure, and if you caught it you would be transferred to Guam and never heard from again. Most of us dismissed these rumors as government propaganda to keep us away from the whores or at least to get us to use condoms (penicillin isn't free) but when AIDS came around in 1981 (killing "free sex" and having women not come up to you asking you "wanna fuck?", damned AIDS!) I started to wonder if the rumor might have been true.
Secondly, a wag I worked with when AIDS started in 1981 said AIDS was an acronym for "Anal Intercourse Death Syndrome". It really isn't an STD but a blood-borne disease, more easily transmitted by blood transfusions, dirty needles, and sex that tears into the flesh. It's damned hard for a man to catch it having sex with a woman unless the sex is anal or while she's on her period, particularly if he's been circumcised.
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Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm skeptical. How could a disease with such a long incubation period not be recognized for over a century? It's not like needles or anal sex were invented in 1965. And then in a period of a few years become a worldwide epidemic? Yeah, I RTFA but I'm not buying the "city" hypothesis; it's not like people in the country don't have anal sex.
It was an order of magnitude difference. Many of the sexual histories of the initial cases in San Francisco had hundreds of sexual contacts per year. Typical bathhouse sexual encounters numbered over 5 per night per person. One case history example is that Gaëtan Dugas claimed to have had 2500 sexual encounters in his life. These types of numbers don't occur in the country. Additionally, country sex is less anonymous and more often with the same partner. Most of the bathhouse encounters were with different people.
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Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not necessary to "stop fucking people you aren't married/monogamous with" to stop the spread of HIV. It's necessary to "stop fucking people whose HIV status you don't know" and "stop fucking without a condom".
Some of us just aren't wired for monogamy, and telling people "don't be what you are!" is always a piss-poor recommendation. Especially when it comes to basic drives like sex.
Get tested, ask your partners to get tested, and just wear it [nsucurrent.com].
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In theory, maybe. In practice, absolutely not. (Score:5, Insightful)
For a similar situation, consider how harmful drug addiction is, and how "simple" it is to get off drugs: just stop buying them and taking them. But drugs plug into a lot of the exact same brain and body hardware and software as sex does. As a result, we've found, "Just Say No" doesn't really solve the problem.
I mean hell, a majority of us Americans can't even stop from eating too much. We all consciously know how to lose weight: eat less, exercise more. Doesn't mean we do it - because far more than our conscious mind is involved in that decision.
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Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to be snide, but:
>How could a disease with such a long incubation period not be recognized for over a century?
I think you've answered your own question.
All you need is for the disease symptoms to take longer to show up than the average lifespan of the victims and you have a basically invisible disease.
Add doctors' general unwillingness to put 'cause of death: unknown' on death certificates, and put your disease in a place where young death from other diseases -- particularly cholera, yellow fever, and smallpox -- was completely rampant, and you have everything you need to make a disease run for fifty years invisibly.
In 1910, there were still widely-respected doctors arguing that bad air was responsible for malaria and yellow fever. The idea that a viral infection could stay latent for 15 years after contraction was completely out of their experience.
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Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Add doctors' general unwillingness to put 'cause of death: unknown' on death certificates, and put your disease in a place where young death from other diseases -- particularly cholera, yellow fever, and smallpox --
Actually, the cause of death wasn't unknown. They very clearly died of cholera/yellow fever/smallpox, and the patient had always been rather sickly. The doctors just didn't realize that there was a disease that caused the patient to be sickly all those years.
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Viral vs Bacterial Diseases (Score:5, Insightful)
You are basically correct that most of those early victims would have died of other, well-known diseases. In addition there were (and still are) a lot of poorly-understood tropical diseases circulating in the affected population, which would have been almost exclusively native Africans living in great poverty in often remote areas of the continent. It would not have registered high on anyone's radar - everyone knew there were a lot of obscure diseases circulating there, but they didn't affect anyone in the "developed" world and nobody had the tools to track them down or treat them in any event; antibiotics were still decades in the future.
However the specific examples of smallpox and yellow fever would probably not have been the most likely secondary infections to cause death. These two diseases are viral diseases, and most of the opportunistic infections that characterize AIDS are bacterial or fungal.
Nevertheless your main point - that the secondary infections would have been mistakenly believed to be the primary infections - is well-taken, it's just that the secondary infections would have been primarily things like cholera, tuberculosis, pneumonia, and so forth.
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Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm skeptical. How could a disease with such a long incubation period not be recognized for over a century
Keep in mind that AIDS doesn't actually kill you. Your immune system is defeated by AIDS and something else kills you. If you have the flu (which can be fatal), then die, the conclusion would probably be that the person died of the flu instead of that their immune system was compromised by some virus that stays dormant for years. Then add onto that the medical technology of the period, and what it was in Africa at that time.
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Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
True but completely misses the point. The point being, unless you're aware of AIDS or you have access to a lot of different cases and are good at spotting abnormal patterns, AIDS deaths look like deaths from other diseases. In other words, AIDS could suddenly appear on the scene without being detected because, to doctors who would see AIDS deaths, it just looks like more of the same.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I'm skeptical. How could a disease with such a long incubation period not be recognized for over a century? It's not like needles or anal sex were invented in 1965. And then in a period of a few years become a worldwide epidemic? Yeah, I RTFA but I'm not buying the "city" hypothesis; it's not like people in the country don't have anal sex.
Thank you Slashdot non-expert for debunking the whole story thanks to wild guesses about the rate of propagation of STDs in the Congolese countryside!
Re:Wait, what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Take a closer look at history, you might be surprised. We're a little more open (in some places) about sexuality at the moment, but what we do in private is probably not that different. 2500 sex partners would have been NOTHING to a sultan 500 or 1000 years ago.
Victorian men used to entertain themselves writing and sharing dirty poetry, and their private studies would often be plastered with porn. Not to mention wenching. A girl in every port. Open, legal, prostitution.
Even the bible is not the shining example of virtue that some would like to believe. Prostitution was perfectly accepted, and men using prostitutes was fine. Adultery was a crime you committed against a man by sleeping with his wife, or a wife by sleeping with another man. A married man sleeping with a prostitute was not adulterous.
In classical Greece and Rome, as well as many other cultures at other times, it was normal for rich men to keep a few young boys around for their pleasure.
No sex before marriage is historically a female injunction. Female virginity was (is) valuable. Men, however, well, boys will be boys. Many of these sayings have their origin right in the time period you pointed out.
As for homosexuality being a genetic defect, the evidence is absolutely the other way. Many animals, including humans, have a significant fraction of the population that is naturally homosexual. In humans it's about 10%. In other animals it may be lower or higher. It's true that homosexuality isn't exactly favorable for your own reproductive success, so survival of the trait in the gene pool (not just of humans but of many other species) indicates that homosexuality MUST have some beneficial effect for close relatives and perhaps for society.
You might have an interesting point though. Historically the warnings about sex have often been disproportionately directed at the penetratee. Virtuous women were to be chaste. Rich men might have sex with (often slave) boys, but they were usually the ones pitching. Many sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS are actually quite difficult for the penetrator to catch.
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Re:Wait, read much? (Score:5, Informative)
You might have quoted Sections C and D which are referenced:
Hardly "just about anytime it wants". So what else did you cherry pick from your other cites?
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Re:Wait, read much? (Score:4, Interesting)
I hate to risk fueling the conspiracy theory fodder in your other reply, but:
Does anyone know if there's a copy of the US Code (preferably online) that includes a revision history? I think it would be fascinating to see the changelog behind some of our current laws.
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So you think the government made AIDS in the 70s? (Score:4, Funny)
Did they make it in Area 51, where the moon landings were staged? It makes sense!
Only one small problem with your theory: How do the Illuminati fit in with this, and what about Kennedy? Until you resolve these two gaps in your theory, I'm afraid I won't be able to give it my full credence.
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Re:Wait, read much? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not interested in the inevitable flamewar of debunking each and every one of Horowitz's unsubstantiated rants, but let's just start at some basics hints: the guy sells trinkets and water, a certified kook deluding people, quite likely away from real, effective treatments for HIV. Oh, and it doesn't stop with HIV, he's full-blown antivaccinationist. If anyone is further interested, you can easily go out there and read the many takedowns or hey, I don't know, actually read up on HIV itself and have a truly educated opinion!
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Re:Wait, read much? (Score:5, Insightful)
"I just find it too hard to believe that we could have the technology to invent something like this and nobody else could figure it out, no scientists involved with the creation got cold feet, etc. It seems too James Bondian."
Can you prove the Government DIDN'T custom build AIDS? No? Well there you go - the theory is fully supported.
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Conspiracy Paradox (Score:3, Interesting)
I just find it too hard to believe that we could have the technology to invent something like this and nobody else could figure it out, no scientists involved with the creation got cold feet, etc. It seems too James Bondian.
And that we'd have that technology at least 40 years ago, but still aren't able to do so in a lab today. If you wanted to argue that _today_ a government lab had the tools to build a virus, then you might be stretching the realm of plausibility.
Oh, hey, maybe we'll use the Roswell time
Re:Wait, read much? (Score:4, Insightful)
While I don't believe AIDS was invented, I do have comments.
If it was not invented, was it discovered then leveraged?
It is also moronic to try to kill off "the poor". Poor is a valuation tied to someone by how large of a number they have tied to themselves. Usually as a result fr working in an economy. It is at best, a transient description. J. K. Rowling was poor, now she is rich. And circumstances in life can take you the other way. There is no way for a disease to target people. Given that we're all 6 degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon, that's not that many partners to spread it over the entire population. Also, if you attack by geography planes and automobiles completely ensure that propagation continues outside the community.
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Re:Wait, read much? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the problem with most "vast conspiracy theories" about just about any topic. The problem is that the success of any conspiracy is usually inversely proportional to both the number of individuals involved and the technical difficulty of achieving its goals. Do you really think that any large governmental body (pick your favorite villain country, it doesn't matter) is both able to cover its tracks so well that nobody (except for the conspiracy theorists, of course, but they always have an infinite supply of tinfoil) is able to see through the ruse, and able to command such fanatic loyalty that thousands or even millions of individuals are sworn to silence for decades?! These are the same people who brought you such monumental successes as the Watergate break-in, the Katrina relief effort, the Maginot line, etc, etc.
Rather what governments are good at (to the extent that they're good at anything) are massive commitments of resources, getting things done by sheer brute force, but often not in a timely or efficient manner. As one person I know says about government, "even a blind squirrel finds the occasional acorn."
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What new diseases have crossed over recently? (Score:5, Interesting)
It took over 70 years for HIV to be named.
What diseases that crossed the species barrier in the last 30 years will we be talking about in 2078?
Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently? (Score:5, Funny)
davidwr's disease!
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Also known as /.itis (Score:4, Funny)
I walked right into that one.
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Re:Also known as /.itis (Score:5, Funny)
I walked right into that one.
Don't do that! That's how you get davidwr's disease!
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Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently? (Score:5, Funny)
the GPL
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Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently? (Score:5, Interesting)
Probably quite a few.
One of the big killers in worldwide mortality statistics (after HIV and malaria) is, if I recall, "acute respiratory infection", which includes just about anything that didn't get an official diagnosis other than the obvious fact the person died of some kind of lung infection. That probably contains countless infectious agents as yet unknown to science.
Infectious agents often develop a kind of symbiotic relationship with their host populations. They are tolerated by the populations, but they are deadly to immunologically naive populations. Move into to take over another population's niche, and you must endure ordeal by disease.
Emerging diseases will be a major story throughout this century, mark my words. As people move into previously "pestilential" habitats, as climate change disrupts and displaces populations, we'll be seeing a lot more the likes of HIV, bird flu, and Ebola (which is probably the least dangerous of the three in a public health sense).
Now is the time for a new Apollo program, but in the biological sciences. Now is the time to pick a family of viruses, like influenza, and learn to attack it, not just by public health and immunization measures, but directly through its genetic, biochemical and biological characteristics. This would not only be of great practical benefit, it would prepare us for new agents, or new strains of old infectious agents.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
>One of the big killers in worldwide mortality statistics (after HIV and malaria) is, if I recall, "acute respiratory infection", which includes just about anything that didn't get an official diagnosis other than the obvious fact the person died of some kind of lung infection. That probably contains countless infectious agents as yet unknown to science.
You're making a mountain out of a molehill. "Acute respiratory infection" is another way of saying an elderly person with a failing immune system died o
Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now is the time for a new Apollo program, but in the biological sciences. Now is the time to pick a family of viruses, like influenza, and learn to attack it, not just by public health and immunization measures, but directly through its genetic, biochemical and biological characteristics.
Would this be a program where we focus a good chunk of the national GDP on curing the flu, finally cure it in twelve people, and then never do it again?
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Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently? (Score:4, Funny)
What diseases that crossed the species barrier in the last 30 years will we be talking about in 2078?
None. We'll all be dead from the Captain Trips by then.
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Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently? (Score:5, Interesting)
Modern transportation networks, industrialized agriculture/animal husbandry, and globalization all make it less likely that a zoonotic disease will be able to remain contained in a small population for the length of time HIV managed. The construction of road networks deep into the rainforests of the Congo (sometimes described as "the AIDS Highway") connected a huge biological reservoir with the wider world, and the construction of the international air travel network eliminated many of the natural geographic barriers to the spread of disease. It is of note that that Ebola and Marburg both found their way out of the jungle at about the same time as HIV; Marburg is naturally endemic to central Africa, but gets its name from an outbreak in Germany.
As development continues into the high-biodiversity tropics, we will continue to be confronted by new diseases. What will disappear is endemism, where a disease can percolate among a small reservoir for decades before breaking out into the wider world. AIDS is thought to have trickled through a network of truck drivers and prostitutes across central Africa, until it finally made it to people who hopped on planes and spread it to Europe and North America. Now, someone can pick up a disease in a jungle (or a livestock processing plant) and bring it to New York, London, or Shanghai the next morning. On the other hand, reporting and containment of outbreaks has become faster- in large part from painful lessons learned from the spread of AIDS.
To more precisely answer the parent's question though-"What diseases that crossed the species barrier in the last 30 years will we be talking about in 2078?"- my guess is we'll still be dealing with foodborne microorganisms, especially the pathogenic E. coli strains, with the expectation that one of those will pop up with a nasty new enterohemorrhagic strain in the vein of E. coli O157:H7. I think we'll still be talking about prion diseases given their relation to the food supply as well. Their first recorded human cases are earlier than 30 years ago, but I'd argue for the emerging future importance of West Nile virus and dengue fever as the types of mosquitoes that spread them have greatly increased their ranges. Probably some sort of viral respiratory ailment (like SARS)- they just spread so easily.
Factoid about E. coli: the O157:H7 strain, the one which causes the most serious human illness, is nothing new. It is estimated to have picked up its nasty shigatoxin (distinguishing it from the more benign strains) between 2 and 4 million years ago. The first recorded outbreak in humans, however, occurred in 1982.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I'm stocking up on gas masks, spam, and guns, but after hearing that I'm also going to be stocking up on orange juice. Figure that'll be good for if I catch it.
Pinky: Ahoy Brain. We're almost out of spam, but there's a bunch of gelatine in here with bits of spam stuck to it. Do you want any?
Brain: [vomiting]
Pinky: Right, I'll save you some then. Zort!
Insert Apple joke here... (Score:3, Funny)
The Apple bumper sticker included with your Apple purchase can also double as an AIDS awareness sticker...
Re:Insert Apple joke here... (Score:5, Funny)
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Maybe Duesberg was right (Score:3, Interesting)
I did a study on AIDS for a philosophy of Science class, focussing on the (then) competing disease models: viral cause and lifestyle cause. The main proponent of the latter was Peter Duesberg, a well respected researcher, who put forth the arguement that HIV was simply an opportunistic infection that could catch hold of a person after the damage they had done to their bodies by IV drug use and poor lifestyle choices. The major arguement behind this was that, if AIDS was caused by an infectious agent, it is acting in a manner contrary to everything we know about how diseases work.
Well, it turns out that he was wrong, and indeed HIV is different than what we've seen before. And the therapeutic treatments bear this out - surpress the virus and people don't get AIDS.
But...
Stuff like this pops up, and one really starts to wonder if the AIDS experts really know what they're talking about. A virus hangs around for a hundred years and then BLAMMO - instant deadliness. Yeah, I guess it's possible, but it does reinforce Duesberg's original point - AIDS doesn't act the way we normally believe diseases should act.
Re:Maybe Duesberg was right (Score:5, Insightful)
HIV/AIDS simply requires certain circumstances (which didn't exist until relatively recently) to thrive effectively due to its specific limitations, such as its means of transmission.
A fire in a desert will not spread effectively, as there's nothing for it to burn and spread via, but a fire in a drought-ridden forest will thrive.
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Re:Maybe Duesberg was right (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It wasn't any less deadly, it was just spread slower(because people with aids died faster and people lived less close together) and wasn't noticed(since it attacks the immune system it's always another disease that kills you)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
and then BLAMMO - instant deadliness
among people western science cared about
Space born virus? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
HIV = Tunguska event?
Although an interesting correlation (repeat old saw about correlation not equaling causation), I'm interested in how your "hypothesis" accounts for the HIV relatives in the simian population prior to that date, and also how this "space virus" managed to migrate from the Russian boondocks to the middle of Africa without apparently spreading through any of the intermediary countries.
1908 also was the last time that the cubs won it a (Score:4, Funny)
1908 also was the last time that the cubs won it all.
Happy birthday! (Score:5, Funny)
Happy 100th birthday, HIV!
Re:FIST SPORT (Score:4, Funny)
Truly, truly insightful.
My only regret is that I have no mod points left.
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Re:FIST SPORT (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:FIST SPORT (Score:4, Insightful)
It's called SIV in primates, and it's actually a different virus (although not very, and it isn't disease-causing in them). I've heard the vaccine story before, but it smacks of conspiracy theory and seems completely unnecessary when any old cut while preparing bushmeat would do the trick. And, actually, HIV has never really been called HTLV-III by anyone outside of Robert Gallo.
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First post now thought to be dated 18:18PM (Score:3, Funny)
While First Post was previously estimated to be from 1-October-2008 18:31, new analysis shows it was actually dates back to 1-October-2008 18:18.
Re:Weird (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Weird (Score:4, Insightful)
Most human epidemic diseases have an identifiable animal origin. The book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" notes this as one of the curses (and blessings in times of war and conquest) of Eurasian agriculture that allowed us to easily take over the New World and yet find it hard to take over Southeast Asia. We know roughly what century or millenia many human plagues originated in and what animals they came from -- think flu from pigs and birds, tuberculosis from cattle and badgers, black plague from rats via fleas.
AIDS is just another disease to recently transfer from animal to human hosts. Even though it's considered sexually transmitted, there are a number of ways it could've gotten into human hosts without breaking the bestiality taboo -- attacks by infected chimpanzees, eating improperly cooked bushmeat (while having a mouthsore), etc. (Bushmeat is where we think Ebola originated from, as well, and we've only been aware of its existence for 30-40 years.)
AIDS's deadliness is one indication of its youth. New diseases which aren't adapted well to their hosts yet often run rampant and kill them off quickly until milder strains (and more resistant hosts) allow for epidemics to linger in the population without killing off all available hosts. Think of new diseases as any other invasive species not yet adapted to its environment (and vice versa). SIV doesn't cause fatal symptoms in simian hosts, for example, but its newly human-adapted HIV strains causes AIDS in humans. Possibly over time, AIDS would be replaced in the human population with a milder disease, like we see with flu strains from year to year. It's hard to tell without giving it a few hundred or thousand more years of evolution to be sure.
So, it's not that strange. We're just "lucky" to see it in its early stages of adapting to its new host species. I'm sure there are more potential human diseases out there that we just haven't encountered yet because we don't have much contact with their current hosts. Cheerful thought, isn't it?
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Spreading junk like that should really be a heinous crime. The idiots who believe that end up putting everyone else at greater risk.