New HIV Strain Discovered 263
reporter and barnyjr were among the readers alerting us to the discovery of a new strain of the HIV virus, found in a woman from the west central African nation of Cameroon. "It differs from the three known strains of human immunodeficiency virus and appears to be closely related to a form of simian virus recently discovered in wild gorillas, researchers report in Monday's edition of the journal Nature Medicine. ... The most likely explanation for the new find is gorilla-to-human transmission, Plantier's team said. But... they cannot rule out the possibility that the new strain started in chimpanzees and moved into gorillas and then humans, or moved directly from chimpanzees to both gorillas and humans. ... Researchers said it could be circulating unnoticed in Cameroon or elsewhere. The virus's rapid replication indicates that it is adapted to human cells, the researchers reported."
One Brave Dude... (Score:5, Funny)
Somewhere, someone was either very desperate, brave, stupid or all of the above to be getting busy with a gorilla.
Re:One Brave Dude... (Score:5, Funny)
Sometimes, love has no barriers...or cupid just does not know that bestiality is a no,no.
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Sometimes, love has no barriers...
Taylor:"Doctor, I'd like to kiss you"
Zira:"Alright....but, you're so damned ugly...."
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Maybe he was desperate for a fix of heroin and used the gorilla's dirty works.
Re:One Brave Dude... (Score:5, Funny)
Given the rate of infection is much higher in the, ahem, receiver of bodily fluids, than the giver, it is much more likely that it wasn't the human who had the predatory sexual instincts.
Yikes. :/ Raped by a gorilla and given Simian aids.
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Somewhere, someone was either very desperate, brave, stupid or all of the above to be getting busy with a gorilla.
You forgot drunk.
Re:One Brave Dude... (Score:5, Insightful)
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More likely the preparation. IIRC, the HIV virus really isn't that hardy outside of a host - cooking the meat likely would have eliminated the infection (and again, IIRC, HIV can generally only be caught orally through and open sore or such in the mouth - it won't survive the conditions in the stomach to infect the host).
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HIV can generally only be caught orally through an open sore or such in the mouth
There, fixed that for you!
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Yes, but it's a more boring explanation, so people are going to ignore it.
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Now, now... as long as it was between consenting adults, there's no need to be prudes about it ;)
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Maybe the transmission happened when somebody ate the gorilla (or prepared the raw meat)? This seems more likely than interspecies sex.
The two aren't really mutually exclusive. Trust me.
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Or someone was just beaten (and bitten) by a Gorilla, who got bored and left? Or the person manages to reach for the gun and shoots the gorilla?
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So, possible a monkey bite? I heard that hurts like a bitch...
Re:One Brave Dude... (Score:5, Funny)
People, people, please remember that when you are having sex with a gorilla, you are also having sex with every gorilla that gorilla has ever had sex with!
[paraphrased from Night Stand]
Or it was in a burqa (Score:5, Funny)
That or it was from a country where the most you'll see of your bride before you've bought it, or of anyone else's wife at all, is akin to a gant cloth dildo with a small netted slit at eye level. So, you know, you could pay four camels to Abdul for his daughter, and maybe she'll be as ugly as the last one when you take the burqa off, or you could get a gorilla for free and you know what you're getting ;)
And if you keep it clothed, nobody would probably even notice. I mean, I can just see it:
Achmed: "Say, Hassan, did your wives just go 'ook, ook'?"
Hassan: "Erm, they're foreign. Haven't learned the language yet."
Achmed: "And by Allah, look at that one. She's broader shouldered than the two of us together."
Hassan: "Yeah, I bought me big wife so she can bear me lots of children. Ha ha."
Achmed: "If you say so..."
Come to think of it, it would make a good marketing slogan: Burqas, helping ugly chicks get laid wherever alcohol is forbidden ;)
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Really? Racist? Wasn't that supposed to be about race instead of about a <insert holy book>-thumping fundamentalist sect?
There is nothing racial about the burqa. There isn't even anything muslim about them. They're the product of one single reactionary sect pining for the good ol' 7'th century days.
And frankly, I see no reason to be tactful about a group which routinely violates human rights and treats their women like slaves.
Briefly:
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Why is this modded "+4, Funny" instead of "-1, Untactfully Racist" ?
Because it's not -racist-, I'm not sure that "untactfully" is really a word or used correctly if it is, "untactfully racist" isn't an available moderation, the mods today aren't overly PC and humorless, but bottom line it's modded funny because IT IS FUNNY.
So, you're trying to regulate "funny"? (Score:2)
I see. So you're the appointed joke police and platinum standard of what every human on the planet should find funny, right? I mean, it can't possibly be that someone else has different tastes in jokes that you do, right? ;)
Re:One Brave DUDE...? (Score:2)
What makes you so sure it was a dude?
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Flash: You're free. He[Gorilla Grodd] can't control you anymore.
Cowin: He wasn't controlling me, we were in love!
Flash: Internet romance.*shrug*
Risk (Score:2, Funny)
The most likely explanation for the new find is gorilla-to-human transmission
So you'll be able to spot those at greatest risk by the way they are walking?
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Gorillas may be far stronger than humans, but we are hung much better.
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How? (Score:3, Interesting)
How would HIV be transmitted from a gorilla to humans?
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hunting and eating,
Re:How? (Score:5, Insightful)
During hunting most likely, get a cut from a branch/rock/weapon/etc, then get the blood from the gorilla in the cut, or get bitten/attacked by the gorilla itself. Could also be transmitted through eating (really I don't know fuck all about it), I imagine that a lot of people there (or "here" for that matter) have gum/teeth problems, perhaps an open wound or sore in the mouth from something, add that to improperly (or uncooked) meat, voila.
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To paraphrase Ricky Gervais, 'at least that's the excuse I would have given'
Re:Has the virus been observed in any animal ? (Score:5, Insightful)
It somehow seems relevant to be able to tell people which animal they should try to avoid. Chimpanzees ? Gorilla's ? Other types of monkeys or perhaps an entirely different animal ?
Dude, in some southern African countries the adult prevalence hits 20% The animal to avoid on that content appears to be: humans.
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I wouldn't really say this requires any extra attention, it should just be good practice on a whole to try and limit/reduce exposure to direct forms of blood/fluid transfers when dealing with any animal.
We probably shouldn't hunt or eat primates at all though really. But any animal is a potential risk for infections. HIV might be the scariest, but there are others that are just as deadly.
Re:How? (Score:5, Funny)
Killing, butchering, and eating your own meat involves a great deal of blood.
Re:How? (Score:5, Funny)
You need to be almost incredibly stoic to kill, butcher and then eat your own meat, though.
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Or incredibly hungry.
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Eating your own meat also involves a lot of flexibility.
Re:How? (Score:5, Funny)
Gorilla mage casts HIV.
You take 23 damage!
You're poisoned!
And that's how babies are made.
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There are stories of primates raping humans.
Who said it has to be bestiality?
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There are stories of primates raping humans.
Who said it has to be bestiality?
I'd be skeptical of such stories, because they could plausibly be (shudder) bestiality rape erotica.
Not saying it definitely never happens, I'm just saying the wretched, amazing human imagination strikes me as the more likely cause of such stories.
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Good point.
You will notice that the places where such stories tend to occur are the same places where "witches steal men's penises" and the like. Somehow I find myself having doubts as well.
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Rule 34 writ large.
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Re:How? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sex, needle sharing, blood transfusion, or breast feeding. Take your pick.
Seriously... I'd guess biting or something like that. There's more here:
http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/resources/factsheets/transmission.htm [cdc.gov]
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I'm guessing it was probably from blood getting into a cut / mouth rather than a misguided attempt to create an ape / human hybrid if you catch my drift. If you ever hunt something you will find out that like humans animals, as a general rule, don't want to die. This leads to a lot of blood, thrashing about and noise where you can easily end up cut. Even when they are dead there are risks as even a small animal has a surprising amount of blood in it which for some reason wants to spread itself liberally abo
Re:How? (Score:5, Interesting)
Somebody once told me, and by somebody I mean someone that should actually be knowledgeable about the subject (Zoology expert), that apparently our DNA is close enough to some primates that it IS possible to have offspring with them, similar to how Lions and Tigers can have offspring (of course most animal hybrids are usually sterile), but nobody's ever tried it for a plethora of reasons (mostly moral ones).
Now this leads me to 2 points:
1) If anyone has any facts or data relating to this little tidbit of information that either proves or disproves it, please post a link or two! I'm very intrigued to know if he is actually right.
2) If this is IS true, then we can probably put this whole idea of someone fucking a Monkey and catching AIDS to rest, since by and large there would HAVE to have been a monkey/human hybrid born at some point, which I don't think has ever happened (despite supposedly being possible).
Re:How? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd have to go back into journals to find exact articles, but here is what I remember from my Primatology courses:
(1) Human/Chimp hybrid experiments have been done, by a Soviet researcher in the early 20th Century. No offspring were ever produced.
(2) Recent research (2000+) suggests that we did breed with chimps regularly in the period following the initial divergence. As time goes on and we continue to diverge, it becomes less feasible.
Not very specific, but it wasn't a topic we covered in any real depth.
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IANABiologist but I've studied some biology. AIUI the DNA is quite similar but breeding is about more than just the DNA. I doubt that the other machinery necessary to produce viable off spring is sufficiently compatible. Wikipedia sheds more light on the possibility of the humanzee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanzee [wikipedia.org]
no hiv was ever transmitted from sex with a monkey (Score:3, Interesting)
do you have any idea how strong a chimpanzee or a gorilla is? we're not talking about a placid herbivore here, we're talking 100+ pounds of pure muscle, sinew and razor sharp canines. this is not an environment in which any bestiality can possibly occur. i think sex with a shark would be easier, seriously
the whole aids-was-from-sex-with-a-monkey line of thought is pure high school sophomore stupidity. way more 4chan than actual plausible science
bushmeat is what it is: a messy stew of tropical disease waitin
Necrobestialsodomogopoly to be exact! (Score:2)
i'm disappointed (Score:2)
Necrobestialsodomopedogopoly
there fixed for your friend
you can't push hot button sex topics without pushing the pedophilia button, come on!
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A dolphin could drown the best human swimmer with only modest effort; but swimming and interacting with them is pretty safe because they are (mostly) friendly social animals. Pissing them off would be a bad plan; but getting along with them isn't too hard. In a similar vein, trying to rape a goril
Re:How? (Score:5, Informative)
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It would be so cool if the Centaur sceletons of Volos [si.edu] were real
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There actually is a documentary about this very subject. It was spurred by the discovery of a chimp that had very human like features; including a difference in facial features and its hip bones allowing for a slightly more human-like posture and stride. It was eventually confirmed by DNA testing it was a mutant and not a human-chimp hybrid. Nonetheless, as a result of the associated exploration of the subject matter, modern consensus is that man is generically too far apart to successfully breed with ape,
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I know there's a GWB joke in there, I just know it... too bad he wasn't the one whose birth certificate is missing, that would be a zinger now!
Whose birth certificate is missing? It [factcheck.org] isn't [snopes.com] Obama's [usatoday.com].
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Well, to be fair, so far Obama doesn't seem to have the education of a chimp, so the parallel doesn't really work out. He's actually pretty witty, I can't think of any major bloopers and blunders he showed during press conferences or TV shows.
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It's ignored because most people had already gotten tired of the Bush jokes, and it results in people of either party switching the channel.
I had a personal rule that a late night comedian is allowed 1 president joke with a limit of another one that builds upon the previous joke. Unsuprisingly, I changed the channel a lot more on Leno than I did Letterman, although Conan and Craig I never changed the channel on for that rule yet.
It's not a matter of my personal opinion of the president, more of a "stop usin
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Or is it simply a metaphor how everyone seems to want to eat of Obama's pie? Or his mother-in-law's pie? Is this a failed metaphor for big business begging at that government's tit for some food?
Help me, I don't get it.
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I don't want to picture him with the quarterback, I don't want to picture him with the quarterback, I don't want to picture him with the quarterback...
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Actually, after seeing what 8 years of his reign did to the republican party, I wish I had voted for him!
I mean he really caused them a severe loss in stature. The real upside though, seems to be that the republicans sound like they are abandoning the crazy nutjob evangelical messages and letting the real conservatives actually try to push an agenda again. Thats such a breath of fresh air.
A real conservative is someone that can be reasoned with. This false-flag conservatism that has been pushed by the wingn
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God-schmod, I want my monkey man!
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Most diseases of humans (but not all) are believed to be zoonoses, meaning they have crossed over from animals to humans. We refer to a certain form of the influenza virus as "bird flu," but that's not really accurate, as all forms of influenza are believed to have originated with birds. It's hard to imagine a human getting sneezed on by a duck and coming down with the flu, but the transmission only needs to happen somewhere once for the disease to have a shot at viability amongst human populations.
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Is that why it's called the "flu"? Har Har Har.
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That's common retarded badmouthing: 'Because they're Africans they must be "oh-so-primitive".'
As the summary states, it is very optimized for humans, and so very likely started in humans too. Which also makes more (common) sense.
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One theory is that HIV/AIDS spread to humans through vaccinations cultured in simian tissue. [whale.to]
Gorilla (Score:4, Informative)
It is believed that HIV jumped to humans eating gorilla meat. Note to self, no more gorilla burgers.
Like the old joke (Score:5, Funny)
A man and his wife are at the zoo, when the man notices a large male gorilla leering at his wife. The man tells his wife, look, that gorilla is really hot for you, show him some skin. Just joking, the wife flashes the gorilla, and it makes the beast bang on the cage, jump up and down and bellow. Just then, the man opens the door to his cage, throws the wife in, and says "now, tell him you have a headache".
What scares me (Score:2, Interesting)
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Why people should read the fine article. (Score:5, Informative)
1. The index patient is from Cameroon, but was living in France at the time of discovery.
2. The patient did not eat gorilla meat personally, by her testimony, and it is likely the mode of transmission to her was from an as yet unidentified male human. She is probably several transmissions removed from the person we would designate the true patient Zero, and that hypothetical person probably is (or was) in Cameroon, and was initially exposed in Cameroon.
3. the patient does not have AIDS symptoms at this time. Best guess is this strain will produce loss of immune function with time if untreated, and will probably respond to the same treatments as the more established strains.
4. This strain could be slower or quicker to go to symptomatic state, not react to some drugs the same, or otherwise vary, but there's no particular reason to expect any super plague or drug resistant strain.
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1. People would just say "no I didn't have any sex" no matter how much they had had.
2. You can't "deport" your own citizens.
You just have wet dreams about living in totalitarian regimes obviously, luckily for the rest of us we aren't under one yet.
you forgot to mention (Score:4, Interesting)
the woman was 62 when she was diagnosed in 2004
meaning, this could be an old strain of aids. by "old" i mean it could have been in the human population for a long time
i hypothesize this simply because the woman is still alive (assuming she wasn't infected 2 years ago) and mild disease is a sign of an "old" disease
the fate of all diseases and all parasites is equilibrium with its hosts. it does no good to kill off your host so quickly there's no retransmission. so after an initial sickle swinging period of mass slaughter, the strains of any disease that dominate will be those who tend to be more mild, simply because by killing less faster, they spread wider and therefore survive longer
so most likely its not the stand or 28 days later we're talking here
Re:you forgot to mention (Score:5, Informative)
the fate of all diseases and all parasites is equilibrium with its hosts. it does no good to kill off your host so quickly there's no retransmission. so after an initial sickle swinging period of mass slaughter, the strains of any disease that dominate will be those who tend to be more mild, simply because by killing less faster, they spread wider and therefore survive longer
This is a popular myth. It is true of some diseases but not of others.
Consider that not all diseases require human-to-human transmission. Some can be transmitted via non-human vectors, for instance mosquito bites. In those cases, the human does not need to be healthy enough to travel, or to come in contact with other humans. The mosquito takes care of that part, so the human can become very sick, very rapidly, without threatening the viability of the disease. Malaria, for example, is ancient, but has shown no signs of becoming less virulent with time. Similarly, the bubonic plague has not evolved to become less deadly since the major outbreaks of antiquity; we simply know more about how to treat it when it does occur.
equilibrium above all (Score:2)
in the case of malaria, it is the host itself which evolves mitigating factors, such as the sickle cell gene, which has evolved 3 different times in 3 different variations in africa, the mediterranean and southeast asia
but yes, with diseases that are not directly transmitted between hosts of the same species, there is no need to dampen fatality. but then the interspecies mode of transmission is a form of dampening in and of itself
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Probably a better example would be lyme disease, the disease can affect deer and mice(and other mammals) and is carried by ticks. Even if the disease destroys humans quickly, the fact that deer and mice can continue to carry the
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Another classic example is cholera, which is transmitted by human feces (particularly when it contaminates water supplies). The more diarrhea, the better for the cholera organism, so cholera strains tend to be very virulent.
Another example is anthrax, which can live outside of a host organism for a long time by becoming a spore and remaining in soil. Because of this capability, anthrax doesn't really care if it runs out of host animals; it just waits for more to come along later.
The point is that while the
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the woman was 62 when she was diagnosed in 2004
meaning, this could be an old strain of aids. by "old" i mean it could have been in the human population for a long time
Of course. Because 62 year old post menopausal women who don't need to worry about getting pregnant anymore don't engage in behavior that might increase the risk of transmission of STD's, so obviously she's had it for years and it's been circulating in the community for years and we're just hearing about it now.
Or maybe you read the article and I didn't and I'm wrongly chastising you for making the assumption that she must have acquired it long ago because she's 'past it' now... either way is good for me :)
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While you're on the right track, it's not that easy. How widely a given disease spreads is dependent on a lot of factors.
Yes, a long incubation period helps spreading it far. But so would ease of propagation. HIV is amongst the diseases that spread fairly badly. It requires the direct exposure of your body fluids to other fluids to initiate a transfer. This is about as "hard" as it gets. There are only two ways, aside of those invented by modern medicine (i.e. blood transfer and IVs), namely sexual intercou
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the fate of all diseases and all parasites is equilibrium with its hosts. it does no good to kill off your host so quickly there's no retransmission.
That's very optimistic of you, but not at all how nature works. Yes, for a slow-enough action things will balance out. But there's nothing in nature to prevent a fast-spreading disease from wiping out an entire population.
The same is true of predators. A pack of wolves WILL eat the deer population to extinction in an area, and then go extinct itself if it can't find other meat. The wolves don't take a regular population tally and decide to cut back on meat and reproducing until the deer repopulate.
The b
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i hypothesize this simply because the woman is still alive (assuming she wasn't infected 2 years ago) and mild disease is a sign of an "old" disease
Not necessarily by any means. 'Mild' can mean a sign of any number of things, such as being very new and poorly adapted to attacking humans.
And HIV itself is only recently known in humans. The 'standard' version we are familiar with is anything but an 'old' disease with respect to humans. And yet it seems almost perfectly adapted to spreading and surviving whi
Gorillas on heroin? (Score:2, Funny)
Great, someone shared their dirty heroin needle with a gorilla... Come on people!
HIV Virus? (Score:2)
SIV may be killing chimps after all (Score:2)
Gorillas (Score:2)
Obligatory (stupid) comic strip reference http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1592 [smbc-comics.com]
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This legacy means that ancient tribal beliefs and superstitions are still prevalent because it was easier to pacify the natives with animism than with modern religion.
First, there is a certain amount of "modern" (ie European) religion in Africa, enough for people to get concerned when the pope gives bad sex advice.
Second, what benefits would a wider introduction of European religion have? Religions usually seem to build their values around the concerns of the time and place where they form so it's likely that say European Christianity would be a bad fit in Africa.
The opportunity to bring Africa into the modern age was thrown away and now we are faced with a backwards, superstitious continent without education, reason, law and order.
Treating Africa as a single entity makes it difficult to have any meaningful discussion here. Africa has a la
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Parent post expresses a very, very unusual point of view. It's almost saying, "colonization, done right, is a good thing; the problem was that Europeans did it wrong." It's very Rudyard-Kipling, "white man's burden"-esque.
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There was a show [pbs.org] describing natural immunity to HIV. In fact, one of the interesting discussions was how the prostitutes in Africa had actually developed immunity to the virus.
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"A group of prostitutes thought to be immune to HIV have now become infected, causing dismay to scientists hoping to develop an Aids vaccine.
It was thought that exposure to HIV on a regular basis created immunity, but six Kenyan women previously thought to be resistant are now HIV-positive. "
From BBC News [bbc.co.uk]
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It's always the africans.
That's not true, SARS was the Chinese.
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It's always the africans.
That's not true, SARS was the Chinese.
And reality television was the Americans.
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Seems commonsensical.
Dating sites for other STDs exist too, like herpes. Which is kind of funny, given that I'd expect about 25% of the people on "normal" dating sites to have it anyway (as that's roughly the percentage in the population at large).
I'm picking the last option. (Score:2)