AIDS Virus Now Estimated To Be 100 Years Old 316
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."
Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Maybe Duesberg was right (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:Space born virus? (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.
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.
Not knowing it's there doesn't mean it isn't. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wait, read much? (Score:2, Insightful)
Morally, I don't doubt that people like Kissinger would want to invent and employ a death plague to kill off all the poor people. This seems like exactly the sort of thing that they would fantasize about while touching themselves late at night.
My biggest beef with that theory is that I don't think we're anywhere near the ability to invent such diseases. Certainly if sekrit goverment scientists could invent it, other scientists not involved in the conspiracy would end up sussing out clues. To make a bit of a leap, the a-bomb was well-known as a theoretical possibility in the 30's. There had been little cause to develop one before the rising military crisis but world events caused leading physicists to begin thinking exactly along those lines. So British physicists knew what American and German physicists were working on, what the state of the art was, and the likelihood that a program could be put together to make the bomb happen. Because of this, when the first bombs were dropped over Japan, civilians with a scientific interest were able to recognize it for what it was. (this comes from accounts of the bomb I've read. The observer thought that an a-bomb was still futuristic like rocket ships and ray guns but could offer no other explanation for the scope of the devastation from a single bomb.)
So the point I'm getting at is if we're able to custom-build viruses, certainly civilian virologists would know about it and there would be signatures of artificial origin, things to indicate that it did not evolve from the natural chimp virus. After all, we can tell wild antrhax from weaponized anthrax.
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.
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.
Re:Maybe Duesberg was right (Score:3, Insightful)
and then BLAMMO - instant deadliness
among people western science cared about
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.
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.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:1, Insightful)
I know where you are coming from and I hope you fuck off and die. I heard this crap enough in the 80s when the government didn't want to acknowledge that AIDS was a disease (until of course, young white women started getting sick). Most diseases are behavioral issues. If you don't congregate with a lot of people and wash your hands regularly, your chance of getting the flu is negligible. If you don't go somewhere where there are a shitload of mosquitos, your chance of getting malaria is zip. If you use fresh water, you probably won't get cholera. And if your brush your teeth, you will drastically reduce your chance of getting gingivitis.
This isn't particularly notable. And nobody is claiming that we shouldn't find the primary agents to fight these diseases when they occur. They only say that about AIDS. My point above wasn't to help you thump your neo-conservative chest. It was to point out the history of the disease. Your point, in contrast, was to blame the victims.
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!
Re:http://www.google.com/search?q=aids+hoax (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.
Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently? (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 of pneumonia that may or may not have turned septic.
There are many ways to get pneumonia, but the large majority of those will be garden-variety Strep. pneumo, Influenza virus, Staph. aureus, Pseudomonas and other well-known and well-characterized pathogens. Rarely will the cause of the pneumonia be identified on the death certificate or discharge report, but if someone poked around the medical chart it will usually turn up a sputum or blood culture. There is no mystery superbug or bugs out there killing tens of millions of people by "acute respiratory infection".
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?
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.
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.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, for this case, let's say an "encounter" is one sexual encounter between two people, where one is infected, and there is a non-zero chance of transmission to the non-infected person.
In fact, I ran some interesting numbers myself just now in Excel.
If we use these as our variables (easy to switch around in a spreadsheet):
Infections per encounter: 1/10
Average years before realizing they're infected and stop copulating: 2
Then if everybody averaged 5 distinct sexual encounters with different people, every single day, then after 2 years, this person will have infected 365 people. And if they keep up the same rate, this will balloon to the whole world's population somewhere around the 7th year.
Of course, there are overlaps, and the "heavy hitter" population is a far cry from the whole world's population.
But for other values things get interesting.
For 1 encounter per week (again, 1 new partner per week, and 1 encounter with them) you're looking at about 15 years.
1 new person per week is pretty damned fast.
1 a month gives us somewhere around 21 years to get to the world's population.
Let's say a sex in the city girl has 5 new encounters per year. (Granted, 5 new people would be multiplied by x times per person, but the numbers come out similarly.)
Here it gets fascinating. Presuming the person "hits it" for 2 years before realizing they're infected and then stops (big assumptions), the rate of spread will equal the rate of "die-off", which would represent cessation of sexual activity after 2 years.
I.e. it stops spreading.
And for even less lucky^H^H^H^H^H slutty people, which is probably most of humanity, the rate of "die-off" actually exceeds the rate of spread, and thus the virus would become extinct.
Of course, sub-populations with high rates of copulation could keep it going, or spreading, in their own worlds, as could longer periods of time before cessation of infectious behavior after learning one was infected.
This model is very simple, and ignores those and other parameters, such as different rates of infection depending on the type of encounter, different rates of infection depending on whether it's a male or female "receiving", the average number of copulations per unique partner is considerably greater than 1, relationships are not always serially monogamous, and this is violated more with higher rates of encounters, and so on.
But those are just tweaks to the general exponential situation.
So, yes, AIDS could have petered along, so to speak, not making much headway until hockey-sticking in the 1960's to early 1970's with the sexual revolution, and specifically, the gay sexual revolution. Then increased detection, awareness, treatments, prevention, changes in risky behavior, and a lower rate of transmission female -> male than male -> male or male -> female all combined to put the clamps on the explosion.
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."
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].
Re:Wait, what? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Mods on Crack (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a tremendously sad commentary on this site that you got moderated Informative/Insightful instead of Funny.
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?
Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently? (Score:3, Insightful)
Several years ago I came down with a chronic illness after some kind of massive viral/bacterial infection. Having had quite a bit of experience over the past years with the medical profession, I believe the problem with your idea of an "Apollo program" for biological sciences is that the healthcare industry is already massively overburdened with the diseases we already know about.
When I first became ill, I was naive in thinking that since my illness did not fit into any standard patterns, physicians might be interested in my condition. What I found from the medical profession, however, generally ranged from indifference to outright hostility. Even one of the best neurologists at Mass General told me essentially "Your symptoms are impossible. Why are you malingering?" I actually received the most honest answer from a harried doctor at the local hospital after an excruciating flareup of pain landed me in the ER. "Honestly, we don't know what you have. I doubt anyone will be able to diagnose what you have, because no hospital has the time or the resources. However, since you weren't killed outright by whatever you got, you will probably recover one day." Not the most heartening speech to hear lying in a gurney, but I did appreciate his forthrightness.
It is not in the best interests of either governments, insurance companies, or the healthcare industry to go around turning over metaphorical rocks to find what horrible diseases may be lurking outside of our knowledge. There are already illnesses like Lyme disease, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, etc. that are consistently downplayed as attempting to treat these conditions is a losing proposition for everyone except the patients. Fibromyalgia has finally gained some mainstream recognition, but I think this has to do with the fact that a pharmaceutical company was able to rehash an old medication under a new patent for the treatment of the condition. As far as others are concerned, if the existence and severity of the conditions is downplayed the healthcare industry doesn't have to deal with them, insurance companies do not have to pay for treatment, and governments don't have to fund research or deal with a concerned populace. It is economically and politically more prudent to be willfully ignorant about the threats that aren't known, shut up about the inconvenient ones that are, and let the casualties fall where they may.
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.
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.
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.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)