AIDS Virus Now Estimated To Be 100 Years Old

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."

Comments

Wait, what?

[DurendalMac]

But I thought it was made back in the 60/70s to wipe out gay and black people! You mean it wasn't the government or the Jews that did it? /loony

Re:Wait, what?

[mcgrew]

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.

Re:Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Wait, what?

[smellsofbikes]

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.

Re:Wait, what?

[R2.0]

In another post I mentioned the 2 competing theories of the disease, behavioral and infectious agent, and how the latter "won". The interesting part is that the treatment model that accompanied the behavioral theory - i.e. "stop fucking people you aren't married/monogamous with" - would have had a BETTER societal outcome than the current treatment model. Right now we have lifetime drug therapy and HIV infection has transitioned from "acute" to "chronic", and researchers have noted that the incidence of casual and unprotected sex in increasing because HIV infection is being viewed not as a fatal disease but as a manageble condition. Great for drug companies; but perhaps not so great for society at large.

Re:Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it was the Gay Nigger Association of America.

Why they would want to wipe out gays and black people, I do not know.

Re:Wait, what?

[Tubal-Cain]

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:Wait, what?

[master5o1]

no no this is just another cover-up story to try and make people forget about that and so that people can try to trust the government or jews a bit more

Re:Wait, what?

[archen]

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

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, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

i would say thats because of social behaviour changes

[according to an unreliable source - my brother] blow jobs were `only` performed by prostitutes before ~1980, and that couples would usually only do head ~4-8 years after intercourse -- nowadays it is common to do head before intercourse

Re:Wait, what?

[4D6963]

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?

[mcgrew]

The interesting part is that the treatment model that accompanied the behavioral theory - i.e. "stop fucking people you aren't married/monogamous with

The trouble is that not all of us can find a monogamous partner. I was faithful to my wife for 27 years, yet it wasn't a monogamous relationship; she's an adulterous slut (at least she was until she got unfuckably fat and ugly). Three years of celebacy after my divorce (she left me for an unemployed auto mechanic) had me banging hookers - it's the only way an ass burger nerd like me can get laid.

That's what I have against gay "marriage"; marriage isn't a right. It's legal for gays to marry, it's just illegal to marry someone of your own sex. I can no more find a suitable woman to marry than if I were gay.

Re:Wait, what?

[VeNoM0619]

One case history example is that GaÃtan Dugas claimed to have had 2500 sexual encounters in his life.

Every day for 6.8 years? Oh wait.. "encounters" can mean anything.... for a minute... I was envious.

Re:Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

The risk of contracting HIV from oral sex is approximately 1/10 of contracting it from vaginal sex. And the per-act risk is pretty low to start with. Wikipedia says 1/2000 with no condom use, but I've read the paper it sources from and that states those figures as a relative risk. Regardless, it is not easily transmitted, especially compared to diseases such as HPV, which are estimated to have as high as 40% per-act transmission.

By contrast, anal intercourse carries 5-10x the risk per act. 1/200. Given the unusually long length of disease latency, that can compound rather quickly before someone realizes something is amiss.

All the more reason to insist that any prospective sexual partners get tested and/or to use condoms (which cut HIV risk dramatically).

Re:Wait, what?

[mcgrew]

According to my professional sources (prostitutes), your brother is ignorant. Blow jobs are as old as prostitution and older than marriage.

What's the difference between a job and a wife? After ten years the job still sucks.

Re:Wait, what?

[mcgrew]

I think "debunking" is the wrong word. "Questioning" is the correct term.

Re:Wait, what?

[ceoyoyo]

Two things to remember: diseases initially spread in an exponential growth pattern, and AIDS is a syndrome. You don't die of an HIV infection, you die of some other disease that kills you because your immune system is shot.

It's surprising to me that HIV isn't OLDER. A few people get it and die of weird diseases. Every year a few more. The growth rate itself grows, until one day the disease is infecting enough new people each year that someone wonders why so many people seem to be dying of otherwise very rare diseases.

Re:Wait, what?

[billcopc]

Getting kicked in the nuts also counts. I'll bet that happened quite a bit to that sad worthless waste of flesh.

Re:Wait, what?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

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, what?

[LWATCDR]

Well lets add in.
Travel. Just how many people from Africa went to the US or Europe before around 1965.
How remote of a region was it.
And just how many people in that region where dieing of other things all the time.
And yes frankly oral sex was considered pretty kinky back in the 60s and 70s. Yes sex with multiable partners and alternative forms of sex have gotten a lot more prolific over the years. Well outside of the military based in far east.

Re:Wait, what?

[Mr. Slippery]

The interesting part is that the treatment model that accompanied the behavioral theory - i.e. "stop fucking people you aren't married/monogamous with" - would have had a BETTER societal outcome than the current treatment model.

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.

Re:Wait, what?

[EaglemanBSA]

You forget that in the region where the disease is purported to have originated, homosexuality is, in many cases, punishable by death.

Re:Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe Obama's preacher, the Right Reverend Wright. He said white people invented AIDS to kill people of color, and by God, if that's a good enough explanation for Obama, then it's good enough for me. All hail our new king, Obama!

And if you buy any of that, I've got some land just south of Pensacola I'd like to sell you. Pathetic, simply pathetic.

Re:Wait, what?

[morbiuswilters]

So you're in favor discriminating against people who are attracted to their own gender because your wife cheated on you and left you for another man, you can't get laid without paying for it and you wouldn't be able to find anyone to marry you anyway. You feel like a second class citizen so it makes sense to treat other people as second class citizens and deny them their rights. Fantastic.

Re:Wait, what?

[Zangief]

People just don't like to act according to your retarded moral standards. Instead of burying your head on the ground and blaming the victims, we are actually trying to solve the problem.

Re:Wait, what?

[SlashDev]

Well in that case, you didn't really die from the flu, but from the symptoms. We can go down that route if you'd like. The root cause of death is the AIDS virus. It's a virus, what it does and how it does it, doesn't really matter. That virus caused your death.

Re:Wait, what?

[Free the Cowards]

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.

Re:Wait, what?

[sjames]

The long incubation period is part of what makes it hard to figure out.

If you get the flu, it's not hard to think back a week and remember the guy with red eyes sneezing on you. You have the advantage that the disease manifests within a week, and it is a recognized illness.

OTOH, AIDS can take years before any obvious symptoms appear (months before even a standard test will show it). The person who gave it to the victim probably seemed perfectly healthy at the time (and had no idea himself). By the time it manifests obviously, the patient is immunocompromized and so likely to have several normally harmless bacteria and viruses present along with HIV. Given that it wasn't yet a recognized disease, it would be easy to first pass it off as 'unknown' and then as numbers mount go down several blind alleys looking for the actual cause (which is exactly what happened). Even more so since HIV is a fairly weak virus in general, so it's surprising the way it gets a foothold and creates such a problem.

Re:Wait, what?

[jbeach]

Also the life expectancy was much lower, and people were dying for a lot of reasons which could camouflage AIDS symptoms - pneumonia, cholera, tuberculosis, yellow fever...

After all, these widespread epidemics could take out both those with relatively healthy immune system and those without. You'd both get flattened by the same tank, and not be around long enough to show any other symptoms.

Re:Wait, what?

[MichaelSmith]

Well lets add in. Travel. Just how many people from Africa went to the US or Europe before around 1965.

Actually I think patient zero was identified as somebody who travelled from the west to africa. But yes, mobility is the issue.

Re:Wait, what?

[Yunzil]

Keep in mind that AIDS doesn't actually kill you.

Well, usually, but AIDS is capable of killing you by itself.

Re:Wait, what?

[Fred_A]

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.

While the beginning of that sentence is true, the end isn't. Oddly enough being circumcised reduces the odds a bit since the amount of exposed mucosa (which is easier to breach through the stress of sex) is lessened. An unexpected side effect of old prejudice (removing the "female" bits on the male sex) which still lives on here and there.

Re:Wait, what?

[jackbird]

I believe the OP meant 2500 different sexual parnters. And his Wikipedia entry agrees.

Re:Wait, what?

[notamisfit]

And failing.

Re:Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was hearing essentially the same rumor in Vietnam in '67 - although our rumor specified the disease to be an untreatable, incurable, disfiguring, and fast moving form of syphilis. As even ordinary syphilis, if untreated, can be fatal, the rumor did encourage thoughtful behaviors.

Re:Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was in Thailand in 1980. We were told it was the "black clap" and it came from a super virus caused by prostitutes not taking a full course of antibiotics.
If you caught it you were sent to Okinawa and you would die there.
Bad stuff.

Re:Wait, what?

[hemp]

It is important to note that Chimpanzees will not cross rivers or lakes. There is no way they could have traveled to Leopoldville.

It is also important to note that they are only talking about HIV-1.

HIV-2 ( from the Sootey Mangabe, a simian that lives in Western Africa ) also exploded at the exact same time as HIV-1. Amazing coincidence for these two diseases to appear simultaneously on opposite sides of the African continent.

The River, by Ed Hopperhttp://www.amazon.co.uk/River-Journey-Source-Penguin-Science/dp/0140283773/ has a very interesting argument that HIV-1 & HOV-2 were introduced by accident during the cultivation of Polio vaccines in Chimpanzee livers. Vaccinations and the earliest cases of HIV can be plotted on a map with amazing correlation.

Re:Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow a boatload of misinformation there. Not to pick apart this crap but for starters recent research says that circumcision decreases, not increases, AIDS transmission risk.

http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2005/07/research_shows.html

That's just for starters. I swear, people will mod anything that has paragraphs up on /.

Re:Wait, what?

[d3ac0n]

Indeed, with the exception of AIDS babies (Infants born with AIDS because their mothers had it, or caught it during pregnancy) and those very rare cases of transfusion-borne AIDS (almost impossible these days), AIDS is a disease that is ENTIRELY related to your behavior.

IE: If both you and your partner were virgins until your first sexual encounter with each other, and have a lifelong, drug-free relationship until both of your natural (or accidental) deaths, the chance of either of you contracting AIDS is statistically zero.

On the other hand, if you engage in sex with multiple partners, live a homosexual lifestyle, or engage in intravenous drug use, you stand a very high chance of AIDS infection. Please keep in mind, AIDS has an incubation period of up to 8 years, during which tests cannot detect the inactive infection. Thus you can NEVER be 100% certain of someone's AIDS infection status. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something, or is a moron.

In addition, homosexual males can have up to 10 times more sex partners than heterosexuals of both sexes. (Lesbians somewhat less, although still higher than heterosexuals, on average.) As has been stated elsewhere in this thread, Anal sex is particularly dangerous in regards to the chances of infection from AIDS. There is a reason why AIDS was known as the homosexual's disease, it has always been most rampant in that community, and still is.

All discussions of morality aside, there is a legitimate question to ask regarding the public financing of AIDS drugs being given out to most AIDS infectees. With the exceptions I listed at the beginning of this thread, the vast majority of AIDS infectees are 100% responsible for their own condition. They consciously engaged in behavior they knew was dangerous, why should the public pay for it? if we were talking about people with cancer from smoking, I doubt anyone here would raise an eyebrow if the suggestion were make to never use public funds for their treatment. But if it's AIDS, suddenly there is some kind of right? that makes no sense.

Ultimately, the "I'm gonna do whatever the hell I want and don't ever tell me not to" attitude of many people has to stop. We simply can't afford it anymore. The responsible people in society end up having to foot the bill so irresponsible morons who make excuses like "I'm not predisposed to monogamy" and can't keep it in their pants and go around making babies, wrecking lives, causing trouble, getting AIDS and then expecting the rest of society to just pay for their waste of a life.

There has to be a choice: Live responsibly, and society will reward you. Live a life of dissipation, and you are on your own.

Re:Wait, what?

[OakDragon]

I can't speak for the GP, but it doesn't necessarily have to be about morality, or looking down on others, or a judgmental attitude. The fact is, the incidence of this disease can be limited through the avoidance of anal sex, and to a lesser degree, use of condoms. Sorry if the simple facts don't conform to your morality.

Re:Wait, what?

[Jorophose]

Before people weren't real sex maniacs. (at least, "normal people" weren't) Somebody here was posting about places in SF where some fellow claimed to have 2500 partners. I don't see ultra-religious 700s-1800s (or maybe 1700s) Europe/NA allowing that. And I'm sure the self-imposed monogamy was in Asia too.

I hate to say this as it sounds harsh and trollish, but somebody once posted here saying "homosexuals are a genetic defect"... And that got me wondering. Did we start being ultra-monogomous (I mean stuff like "no sex before marriage", not, "one partner forever") to stop the spread of diseases like AIDS?

Re:Wait, what?

[ceoyoyo]

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.

Re:Wait, what?

[CSMatt]

So then how does this help prevent transmission via infected needles?

Re:Wait, what?

[TheLink]

The fact is quarantine is one of the methods to control diseases with no cure.

Quarantines aren't 100%, neither are condoms.

To me, as long as people are informed about the risks and consequences, they can fuck around and die if they want. Then it'll just be a matter of "natural selection" - already some groups appear to have immunity.

It'll be a bigger problem if the disease becomes more contagious than it is now.

Lastly, the typical virgin slashdotter living in the basement is unlikely to get AIDS ;).

Re:Wait, what?

[TheLink]

Something else kills you, like your own malfunctioning cells.

When your immune system gets defeated, your odds of getting many cancers go up too.

Some (all?) of these cancers are due to viruses and bacteria.

But there's hardly any practical way to avoid exposure to those. Babies could be "inheriting" those viruses from their mothers.

Re:Wait, what?

[CSMatt]

In addition, homosexual males can have up to 10 times more sex partners than heterosexuals of both sexes. (Lesbians somewhat less, although still higher than heterosexuals, on average.) As has been stated elsewhere in this thread, Anal sex is particularly dangerous in regards to the chances of infection from AIDS. There is a reason why AIDS was known as the homosexual's disease, it has always been most rampant in that community, and still is.

I'm sorry, but to me this just just reeks of homophobia. What makes you think that homosexuals are any less capable of monogamy than heterosexuals? Sources, plz.

Re:Wait, what?

[TheLink]

"indicates that homosexuality MUST have some beneficial effect for close relatives and perhaps for society"

Incorrect. All it needs to stay in the gene pool is for it to not have a huge negative effect.

I'm not saying homosexuality does not have a beneficial effect or not, just that your statement is incorrect.

As long as your gene line still manages to reproduce successfully, it doesn't matter how crappy the genes are :).

There are tons of species that are just this close to extinction. As long as they live in a "friendly" or suitable environment, they can be and do silly stuff all they want.

Just introduce a bunch of polar bears to the Antarctic and see how long the penguins last.

Re:Wait, what?

[ceoyoyo]

You're correct, the overall effect doesn't actually need to be positive, but when there's an obvious negative effect it needs to also have a positive one to cancel it out.

If a specific trait has a negative effect (homosexuality means you don't breed) then the trait MUST also have a positive effect that at least cancels the negative one, or it will become less prevalent. Either that or the negative effect isn't really a negative effect.

The classic example is sickle cell anemia. The gene for it, if you have two copies, kills you. It's quite rare in cold climate populations, even though one copy isn't actually directly harmful. However, it's more common in warm climate populations, because one copy provides resistance to malaria.

Potentially lethal or prevents-you-from-breeding genes aren't something you can keep around on a whim.

Re:Wait, what?

[DrStoooopid]

The simple answer is globalization.

As faster modes of transportation became readily available, the virus was able to spread farther and more frequently.

Think about it. Someone catches HIV in the late 1800's in Africa at the beginning of their stay. Let's say they stayed in Africa for a few years, and died on the ship voyage back to their homeland. Nobody really knew what they died of, they could simply say "A case of jungle fever"...(pun intended).

Fast forward 100 years...you can see where I'm going with this. As travel becomes cheaper and faster, more and more people are able to travel and/or hasten the spread of any disease.

Re:Wait, what?

[TheLink]

Homosexuality is not lethal (if you manage to keep it a secret in some countries ;) ), nor does it prevent you from breeding.

Many homosexuals have children, some even from consensual sex.

BTW I've a female friend who claims that "all the cute guys are gay!".

So maybe the genes that make human males prone to homosexuality could also make them attractive to some girls, which may increase their chance of reproductive success way beyond typical slashdotters, esp with the addition of drugs like alcohol etc ;).

In short a cute gay guy might have a higher chance of having children than I do :).

Re:Wait, what?

[fireboy1919]

It's necessary to "stop fucking people whose HIV status you don't know"

I'm sure that everyone would like to know how to make sure that no one connected to them though a node network of sexual partners has aids. All it would take is one guy/girl lying, and spreading it to all the people who sleep with them, and for the next eight years, everybody they slept with will spread it to everyone else they sleep with (and on, and on).

But you seem to have the answer. How can this be made to not happen?

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.

Yeah...well, we're wired to kill, too. It is also a basic drive. Do we let people do that indiscriminately? Apparently telling people "don't be what you are" is a piss-poor recommendation.

We need to fix the education, though. I think it may be time to institute a "guns in schools" program so that they can know how to use them safely. We wouldn't want our youngsters to accidentally hurt themselves while they're off satisfying their basic urges of killing people.

See where I'm going here? There are plenty of valid arguments for non-monogamy. The idea that resisting instincts is somehow bad isn't one of them. Resisting basic instincts is part of what it means to have a civilization.

We take it for granted that we don't kill, steal, rape, despite the extremely natural instinct to do these things. I see no reason why sex isn't exactly like those other things.

I don't want to discount your idea entirely. Do you have a reason why non-monogamous sex is important to have that doesn't revolve around believing that instincts shouldn't be repressed? Do you have any actual facts to support your claim?

Seems to me that it just comes down to the fact that people want it more than they are worried about consequences from it rather than any actual reasoned view that justifies non-monogamy. Which, ironically, is about the same reasoning by people who steal, kill, and rape (i.e., they don't put much thought into justifying it...they just do it).

Re:Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please keep in mind, AIDS has an incubation period of up to 8 years, during which tests cannot detect the inactive infection. Thus you can NEVER be 100% certain of someone's AIDS infection status. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something, or is a moron.

HIV infection can almost always be detected within 6 months and more often much shorter (a matter of weeks). Your statement is either (1) a straight-up lie or (2) recklessly ignorant if you don't believe HIV causes AIDs.

Re:Wait, what?

[famebait]

If you could just go and change people's behavior at will we could have world peace tomorrow as well.

The fact is that abstinence campaigns have generally had zero or negative effect.

Re:Wait, what?

[famebait]

Indeed, with the exception of AIDS babies (Infants born with AIDS because their mothers had it, or caught it during pregnancy) and those very rare cases of transfusion-borne AIDS (almost impossible these days), AIDS is a disease that is ENTIRELY related to your behavior.

False. It is also related to the generally unverifiable behavior of your partner.

They consciously engaged in behavior they knew was dangerous, why should the public pay for it?

Because most of the public engages in some of those those practices, and empirically it is impossible to stop them doing so.

I doubt anyone here would raise an eyebrow if the suggestion were make to never use public funds for their treatment.

And what is the weather like on your planet? Which, by the way, is where I think my eyebrow might be right now.

I'll go for an accepting and functioning society over your self-righteous hatred any day. We all know where that kind of thinking leads.

Re:Wait, what?

[HungryHobo]

Well you can avoid almost all serious diseases by simply not socialising with anyone and not having sex with anyone. Ever. There's always the chance that any partner could catch a serious disease in an unusual way or be unfaithful without your knowledge so the safest thing to do is avoid all sexual contact.

Sure the drive to have sex with at least one person is a natural instinct but as you said, people shouldn't just give in to instincts. See where I'm going with this? Most people enjoy socialising rather than avoiding human contact whenever possible but the responsible thing to do is to seal yourself into your house and get a job where you can telecommute to cut down on human contact.

Seems to me that it just comes down to the fact that people want it more than they are worried about consequences from it rather than any actual reasoned view that justifies non-virginity. Which, ironically, is about the same reasoning by people who steal, kill, and rape (i.e., they don't put much thought into justifying it...they just do it).

The idea that resisting instincts is somehow bad isn't one of them. Resisting basic instincts is part of what it means to have a civilization!!!111!!!!

Re:Wait, what?

[HungryHobo]

Do you trust your partner?
Are you sure they haven't had sex with anyone else in the last 8 years?
How are you sure? Do you follow your partner everywhere or do you take their word for it?

The fact is that unless your the sort of untrusting controlling asshole who nobody wants to stay involved with then your partner could have had sex with someone else.
And if you catch AIDS as a result it is entirely your own fault.

Monogamy doesn't go far enough! complete celibacy for life is the only way to be sure!

Re:Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to discount your idea entirely. Do you have a reason why non-monogamous sex is important to have that doesn't revolve around believing that instincts shouldn't be repressed? Do you have any actual facts to support your claim?

Well, for one, monogamy slows down natural selection, as genetic winners don't get to spread their genes around as rapidly as they would otherwise. It also slows down variability spread. Both the desire to cross your genes with winners' genes and the desire to do some ... diversification, are main reasons why neither condoms nor monogamy tendency does work well. It shows that people fuck around for babies, not fun, after all. It's just they are not aware of that.

Nowadays those natural urges are regulated by serial monogamy, but more natural way would be a marriageless society systematically supportive to both the mothers having small children as well as children in their growing and learning years.

That's why it is my belief that monogamy is predominantly an invention coming from great and grave STD plague of the Neolithic's (prehistory). We know for certain that there were some dire straights for human race back then and marriage is more or less spread all over the globe. There is also recurring idea that deities frown upon human "lust" and bring destruction upon them for it - it is a certain hint of widespread catastrophic.

Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to defend the polygamy or promiscuity, after all, I don't think I would be among the genetic winners, so this is probably better for me, I am just trying to shed more light on the subject, beyond usual cover-all phrases, such as "instincts" or "civilization".

Oh, and, there is always another bug lurking in our future. Better safe then sorry.

Re:Wait, what?

[lisaparratt]

Not being monogamous isn't the same as being a slut.

All 4 of my girlfriends are clean. It doesn't matter how much non-monogamous sex I have with them, I won't catch AIDS.

Re:Wait, what?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

The River, by Ed Hopperhttp://www.amazon.co.uk/River-Journey-Source-Penguin-Science/dp/0140283773/ has a very interesting argument that HIV-1 & HOV-2 were introduced by accident during the cultivation of Polio vaccines in Chimpanzee livers. Vaccinations and the earliest cases of HIV can be plotted on a map with amazing correlation.

Compelling as it is, this hypothesis has apparently been debunked.

Now personally, that said, I don't find the "sexual revolution"+globalisation explanation very compelling either. I'm not ready to accept that society underwent as dramatic a shift in its sexual habits during the 1960's. I simply think that people became more open about those habits.

In an age before photographers, newspapers and gossip magazines, it was probably quite easy to have a sexual lifestyle that would raise a few eyebrows even today, yet have the rest of society be completely oblivious. Anonymity was not as scarce as it is now and in addition, people simply did not publically, or even privately discuss sexual matters.

Read old greek classics. Read the Bible. Read old poetry from before the 18th century. There is some pretty scandalous stuff in there, which I think is reflective of a very "liberal" attitude to sexual relations. Read about kings and lords and bishops right up until the 19th century. Every second one had mistresses, concubines, and even catamites! Compared to the habits of ancient, and not so ancient, aristocrats , our society is positively puritan.

And what about ordinary people? We know even less about them than we do about the upper classes. But look at places like Pompeii, where there is clear evidence of not only public brothels, but of explicit imagery surrounding the worship of gods of "fertility". Does this suggest a sexual conservatism among the general populace? Are these people who would have "disapproved" of the free love of the '60s?

So in short, to say that globalisation has lead to the spread of AIDS is in my view a reasonable position. But the view that changing sexual habits are also a cause is a more dubious position. And it is dubious because no-one has ever really shown that the sexual habits our society has today are really all that more "promiscuous" than those of our ancestors.

Re:Wait, what?

[stephanruby]

There you go, I corrected that for you.

..the treatment model that accompanied the behavioral theory - i.e. "stop fucking people you aren't married/monogamous with" - would have had a better THEORETICAL societal outcome than the current treatment model.

I added the word "THEORETICAL" because most good theories have a better societal outcome IN THEORY (after all, why else would people come up with them). For instance, the communist redistribution of wealth theory sounds like it would have had a better societal THEORETICAL outcome than capitalism (if it weren't for those communist leaders and those pesky people that destroyed the communist system with their own personal selfishness and corruption). And for instance, I'm sure that the Sarah Palin Birth Control Method would have a better THEORETICAL societal outcome as a whole (if it weren't for those pesky drug-using, pregnant-alcohol-drinking, and ungrateful-irresponsible selfish Alaskan teenagers).

Re:Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know where you are coming from and I hope you fuck off and die.

That's what the gays and swingers are doing, not the conservatives.

Re:Wait, what?

[rohan972]

Some of us just aren't wired for monogamy, and telling people "don't be what you are!" is always a piss-poor recommendation.

And some of us are just wired to let people bear the consequences of their own actions. Is telling people "don't be what you are!" still a piss-poor recommendation when it comes to us?

I've seen people argue the right to enforce compulsory schooling on the basis that they don't want to pay unemployment benefits to people who didn't get educated. Compulsory seat belts so we don't have to pay medical expenses for people unnecessarily. Now whatever you think of government schools, welfare, various compulsory safety rules and socialised medicine, the consensus seems to be that if you are footing the bill for the consequences of an action, you get the right to regulate that action.

Freedom to express sexual orientation is based on self-ownership, right? You can do what you like with your own body, consenting adults and all that. But if the product of my labor is forcible taken from me I no longer have self-ownership. If my rewards are taken to pay for the consequences of another's action then that other person has become my master. As far as I'm concerned, do what you like, but pay for it yourself.

Re:Wait, what?

[bloobloo]

Almost 30% of the population of South Africa have HIV.

I wouldn't say that makes it a homosexual's disease.

Re:Wait, what?

[Terminus32]

Yeah, I thought the Illuminati created AIDS in 1975 in a laboratory to reduce the population of Africa?? Funny how it appeared out of no-where...I don't buy this story.

Re:Wait, what?

[mcgrew]

Not at all. In fact, I'm all for monomagy, and if the person you're attracted to is your own sex it's none of my business. I'm saying I face the same problem as you, and you insult a would-be ally. Good thinking there, Sparky.

I'm not for discriminating against anyone. I'm just saying that your living with your partner is no more "marriage" than my living with the three women that are sharing my home now is "marriage".

I'm not only against discrimination on the basis of sexuality, I'm against discrimination on the basis of marital status. I see no reason why I should be discriminated against just because I can't find a mate. I can see giving tax breaks to a parent, married or single, of a minor child, but not on the basis of marriage.

I understand that one problem gays face is at the end of life, the family/hospital/whoever can arbitrarily keep you from the person you love. That's just plain wrong, and it has nothing to do with sex or sexual preferance. Let me tell you about Charlie and Ralph.

If you've seen my NSFW journals, you know Charlie is a 35 year old woman. She mostly does work traditionally called "men's" work, like carpentry. Currently she's cleaning and fixing up houses in the ghetto for slumlords. She's one of the three women who live with me now.

Ralph died a few weeks ago. He was 86 years old, a few weeks short of his 87th birthday. He was a dear friend of mine. He had been married twice, and was estranged from most of his family, especially his daughters from his first marriage.

Charlie lived with Ralph for eight years. In some states she would have been considered a common-law wife, but they don't recognize common law marriages in Illinois.

She wasn't allowed to visit him in the hospital before his death.

The problems you are experiencing are, as I was trying to say in my previous comment that your rage has blinded you to, was that the discrimination is not on the basis of your sexual preferance. What is wrong here is not allowing the terminally ill person to make the decision as to who can or can't come see him or her.

We weren't even allowed to go to his funeral; it was family only. We are all grieving, especially Charlie, who lived with and cared for him for eight years.

It has nothing to do with sex, sexuality, or sexual preferance. You are blinded by your own predjudices and biases, jumping to unwarranted conclusions and insulting someone you know absolutely nothing about.

You aren't going to win any converts to your cause with your attitude.

Re:Wait, what?

[mcgrew]

recent research says that circumcision decreases, not increases, AIDS transmission risk.

You seem to have a reading comprehesnion problem, or perhaps my writing was ungramattical. Perhaps if I use bold quoting myself: 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

Maybe I just wasn't being clear. It is harder for a circumcised man to catch AIDS than one with a foreskin.

Re:Wait, what?

[fireboy1919]

Your logic is flawed. It doesn't matter how many people you sleep with. Your chances are based upon the number of people in your node network.

Lets say that non-slut=only two sex partners (ever), but that the standards slip as they get further away from you in the sex-partner network.

So each of your girlfriends has had only one other sex partner, but each of those has had two, and each of *those* has three others...for simplicity, lets say that the pattern maxes out at 6, and none of those people have ever had sex with anyone other than their partner.

How many is that?
4+8+16+32+64+128=252

So in this relatively small chain (unlikely small), you are assuming that no one has HIV, or that they don't transmit it to any of their partners, or that there's a barrier protecting you (i.e., all the ones close to you in the node tree are *really good* at not making condoms break).

Now for some STDs, your partner can know that they have it, which mitigates circumstances greatly. HIV can go unknown for a *REALLY LONG TIME*.

So I'd generally say that you're wrong unless you can somehow know the entire sexual history of everyone you sleep with and trace it back to people who have only slept with one person.

Re:Wait, what?

[lisaparratt]

Each of my 4 girlfriends also has 4 girlfriends - the other 4.

Being non-monogamous doesn't have to entail a huge sprawling network. The issue is not with how many partners you have, but how open the relationship is, and the quality of the longest path of the trust network. In this case the longest path is exactly the same in this family as it is in a monogamous family. Preaching monogamy is at best a simplification, and given how it's used to denigrate those who aren't, backwards and prejudicial at worst.

Re:Wait, what?

[bcwright]

Completely offtopic, but the video in your signature is just really cool - I hadn't seen it before.

Re:Wait, what?

[DeepHurtn!]

That's what I have against gay "marriage"

NON SEQUITOR ALERT

And just as a tip: bitterness, especially when one projected onto others for completely unrelated reasons, is one of the least attractive character traits out there.

Re:Wait, what?

[Darby]

That's what the gays and swingers are doing, not the conservatives.

There is substantial overlap between those groups, dipshit.

Re:Wait, what?

[Darby]

In short a cute gay guy might have a higher chance of having children than I do :).

I was in high school when I figured out that gay haters are fucking morons. Let's see, they're (massively generalizing) largely in good shape, snazzy dressers and know how to talk to girls about all that emotional crap.....And I want them for competition why exactly?

Re:Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Haha lol at you and your logic. How silly.

Re:Wait, what?

[Darby]

But I thought it was made back in the 60/70s to wipe out gay and black people! You mean it wasn't the government or the Jews that did it? /loony

What are you talking about?!?!

You are aware that both Jews and the government existed 100 years ago, right? So there's really no problem with that theory still....Well...ok...there's no *new* problem with that "theory" just because it's pushed back a few decades ;-)

Re:Wait, what?

[Cornflake917]

Yeah, well all 16 of my girlfriends are clean too. I ran Norton anti-virus last night!

Re:Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where does he say they are less capable? I just don't see it. I also wasn't looking for something to whine about.

Re:Wait, what?

[ceoyoyo]

I was referring to strict homosexuality. You're right, bisexuality doesn't prevent you from breeding. There are strict homosexuals though, who have as little interest in sex with the opposite sex as strict heterosexuals have in sex with their own sex.

Re:Wait, what?

[jsoderba]

This is only a problem if you give people a choice about reproduction. In most societies reproduction has been heavily controlled by clan elders. Most gay men can get it up long enough to impregnate a woman even if they aren't happy about.

Re:Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as circumcision and risk to HIV infection, there are conflicting reports. Some studies have shown an increased risk with a natural penis, and some have shown an increased risk with a mutilated one.

Re:Wait, what?

[mog007]

Human beings have been sex maniacs since our species branched from our common ancestors to actually become "human".

Every life form on this planet has the overriding desire to survive, and right after survival of the organism itself comes the survival of that organisms genes. The only way to ensure your genes survive, is to fuck everything you can find.

Ultra-religious 700s-1800s? You mean during the Dark Ages? Back before the reformation, when the Catholic church was running its own set of brothels?

They stole the idea from the Romans, who had temples where you could donate money and worship the gods of fertility and lust by.. well.. being lustful and trying to procreate.

Re:Wait, what?

[ceoyoyo]

Uh, can you give an example of a society that has universal forced reproduction? In general it works in exactly the opposite way: if you don't want to do it, there are lots of others who do.

Plus animals like seagulls certainly don't have "clan elders" forcing them to have sex. A seagull who doesn't want to engage in reproduction doesn't.

Re:Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, there are the log cabin republicans http://www.logcabin.org/
but for the most part, the issue is seen this way: The Gay Republican: Oxymoron, or Just Moron?
Besides, it isn't my opinion, I was trolling. In my opinion, anyone who says "I know where you are coming from and I hope you fuck off and die" has made an open invitation to trolling and I accepted. I wasn't trying to be informative, I was being antagonistic. You're not supposed to feed the trolls right? I guess that makes you the dipshit.

Re:Wait, what?

[TheLink]

Well my sig used to log people out, but too many people complained (they should learn to check before they click - there are far more dangerous and annoying links out there).

So I put a video instead. Not a rickroll, but one still complained!

Anyway, as you've probably found there are plenty more similar videos in youtube.

Here are some random videos on different topics (not rick rolls :) ).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3nNiUStTE0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvzZdzkRQLc

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth.html

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

Have fun :)

Re:Wait, what?

[brkello]

Yeah, but do you know that all of their other 4 boy friends are clean? Do you know that they aren't starting to have new sexual relationships. Certainly, monogamy is safer because by definition it is between 2 (in this case we are assuming clean) individuals. So their chances are better than yours because you are trusting your girls not to be as slutty as you (or to test a lot).

Re:Wait, what?

[GWBasic]

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.

Somehow I suspect that AIDS has been around much longer then we realize... It's just that a more recent mutation made it more communicable and deadly. For example, perhaps there was an older version that had a 40-50 year incubation period and was harder to spread?

Re:Wait, what?

[lisaparratt]

They don't have 4 other boyfriends. We only have each other. The only difference is there are 5 people in the relationship instead of 2.

Being poly doesn't mean being open. A closed relationship is as saf, regardless of the numbers.

I know the average slashdotter doesn't gave experience of fidelty, trust, or even relationships, so probably doesn't have the first clue about non-mainstream relationships

What new diseases have crossed over recently?

[davidwr]

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

davidwr's disease!

Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently?

[moderatorrater]

Obviously the QDP virus, and the OVB bacterium will have mutated by that point as well. Of course, after our bout with AFLP in 2048, we'll be much better equipped to deal with them, even with the smaller population. Overall, 2078 will be seen as a time when we've mostly re-conquered disease.

Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently?

[philspear]

Miss Cleo says ebola. 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.

Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently?

[R2.0]

I'm just going to assume the "Informative" mod is meta humor. It's either that or despair for the human race.

Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently?

[Bloater]

the GPL

Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently?

[hey!]

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.

Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently?

[HTH NE1]

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!

Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently?

[dr_strang]

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.

Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently?

[davidsyes]

Miss Cleo? Hell, she couldn't even see the IRS coming to pat(ra) her ass down... So much for her predictions.

Now, if janjaweed is a cure for drug-related pains or pangs...

Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it really 100 years old? I remember only hearing about it in the 80's. could it be that the people who got it look 100 years old?

Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently?

[Anonymous Coward]

Argh, I hate my browser. It wrapped your text right between "Overall, 2078 will be seen as a time" and "when we've...".

Skimming your post, I was full of anticipation that 2078 was going to be seen as a time of the desktop Linux.

At least less sick days means more time for coding (or less free time for coding)....

Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently?

[reverseengineer]

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.

Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently?

[Stickerboy]

>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:What new diseases have crossed over recently?

[Toll_Free]

That's a truly scary question.

Wish I had mod points.

--Toll_Free

Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently?

[hey!]

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.

Here in the US, yes. In the African bush, largely not not exclusively so.

Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently?

[Arterion]

Also less commonly know as 791652's disease.

Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently?

[Arterion]

I think we'll be seeing problems from GM crops around that time. I don't trust those new proteins and neither should you (mad cow disease anyone?). Of course, I am not again GM crops, only the very rudimentary kind that we are able to make with yesterday's science.

Of course by the time we figure that out, poor control conditions used in experiments will have cross pollinated to even the "organic" cousins, so that we're all doomed. Not just the poor folks who can only afford the cheap stuff.

Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently?

[Free the Cowards]

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?

[bitrex]

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.

Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently?

[Anonymous Coward]

OOXML

Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently?

[Mistshadow2k4]

Rarely will the cause of the pneumonia be identified on the death certificate or discharge report

Exactly. I've seen this in action; they never bother to figure out what caused the pneumonia. I think you made a case for the statement you were trying to criticize there. From my experience, if a person gets sick and dies of pneumonia, they'd have to have some other remarkable symptoms for the doctors to ever bother trying to find out what actually caused the pneumonia. Otherwise they're going to assume it was one of the common pneumonia-causing diseases. They're probably right most of the time, but when it comes to any one particular case, it could be an alien virus for all they know.

Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently?

[pablodiazgutierrez]

I'm not sure to consider Ebola less dangerous as a public health issue than AIDS. At least we can effectively prevent infection from HIV, but Ebola is, as far as I remember, airborne. And I like breathing every few seconds.

Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently?

[s1a2n3c4e]

What species barrier did THAT jump? .I know RMS looks shabby, but don't insult him by calling him a separate "species"..

Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently?

[hey!]

If Ebola mutates so that it incubates for a week or so longer while the victim walks around infecting people, then it would be a bigger public health concern.

It's too fast and too obvious to spread far.

Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently?

[hey!]

Well, the healthcare industry, if I am correct, is going to have to change its attitude. The diseases lurking outside our knowledge are not going to stay there.

The reason doctors aren't interested in diseases they don't know how to cure should be obvious. It's triage. Why should I (the doctor) waste time on you, with your interesting exotic disease, when I'm not going to change the course of your disease, given that I probably have a dozen patients I can cure waiting for my help?

My belief is that fundamental advances will improve approaches to already known diseases and reduce new diseases to something we know a bit more about.

We already do this to some degree. We have a number of shotgun style therapies that don't need to be precisely targeted. If you come in with an infection the doctor tries to figure out whether it's bacterial, viral, or parasitical. That's the reason for the two aspirins/call me in the morning prescription. If your fever goes down, he proceeds on the theory it's bacterial and prescribes an antibiotic. If it's not he proceeds on the theory it's viral and you'll have to tough it out, unless he things you might die in which case you might get acyclovir. If it's parasitical, you're in for a rough patch unless it's from a very short list.

Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently?

[Anonymous Coward]

Clayark disease.

Re:What new diseases have crossed over recently?

[JimFive]

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

(Most) Physicians are not researchers. If you want to get someone interested in your condition because it is unknown you need to find someone with the time, ability (and possibly mandate) to research it. To really get that research going, though, is going to require that a sufficient population of people be found that have similar symptoms that can be researched. Good luck with that.

--
JimFive

Re:FIST SPORT

[Anonymous Coward]

Truly, truly insightful.

My only regret is that I have no mod points left.

Insert Apple joke here...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Apple bumper sticker included with your Apple purchase can also double as an AIDS awareness sticker...

Re:Insert Apple joke here...

[DeadManCoding]

Actually, I think the better joke would be, "Eh, it's still not as old as McCain..."

Immunity reason for aging

[0xABADC0DA]

To spread, a virus has to infect from older to younger people faster than they grow old and die. This is especially pronounced for an std, with far less chances to spread than say a flu.

I bet there's some correlation between how long a being lives and how good its immune system is at fighting off new viruses. What I mean is, creatures like sharks, the crock family, turtles(?) have such fierce immune systems (ie molecular acid for blood) that they can afford to live basically forever.

Re:Immunity reason for aging

[icebrain]

the crock family

Country and pot?

Re:Immunity reason for aging

[HTH NE1]

What I mean is, creatures like sharks, the crock family, turtles(?) have such fierce immune systems (ie molecular acid for blood) that they can afford to live basically forever.

I think you're getting your Earth species confused with Internecivus raptus .

Re:Immunity reason for aging

[CronicBurn]

How funny that an add for "The Flexible Shaft Ratcheting Screwdriver" from ThinkGeek shows up, in an HIV/AIDS thread, and it's tag line is "More flexible screwing".

Har...

Re:Immunity reason for aging

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you've been watching "Aliens" too much...

Re:Immunity reason for aging

[Randle_Revar]

What I mean is, creatures like sharks, the crock family, turtles(?) have such fierce immune systems (ie molecular acid for blood) that they can afford to live basically forever.

Ooookay then

Re:Immunity reason for aging

[AragornSonOfArathorn]

What I mean is, creatures like sharks, the crock family, turtles(?) have such fierce immune systems (ie molecular acid for blood) that they can afford to live basically forever.

So that's why I always get terrible heartburn after eating turtle soup. Thanks! That clears up my gastrointestinal mystery.

Shhh!

[davidwr]

That tidbit is still covered under the Apple's NDA until December 1st.

hgmm

[Anonymous Coward]

first post

"Genetic analysis"

[Anonymous Coward]

Experts say it's no surprise that HIV circulated in humans for about 70 years before being recognized. An infection usually takes years to produce obvious symptoms, a lag that can mask the role of the virus, and it would have infected relatively few Africans early in its spread, they said.

Also AIDS itself only attacks the immune system, so death caused by secondary infections. And since the immune system depends on the general health of a person I would guess that with the progress in the last 100 years an infected person lived longer and longer, getting more time to spread the virus. Add to that the mentioned rise of cities and you have the long time lag between the first human infection and the worldwide spread.

Re:"Genetic analysis"

[Creepy Crawler]

I thought that HIV went after the brain itself after a long amount of time.

Most cases, the body is attacked by the multitudes of junk viruses and bacteria.

Also known as /.itis

[davidwr]

I walked right into that one.

Re:Also known as /.itis

[MightyYar]

I walked right into that one.

Don't do that! That's how you get davidwr's disease!

Re:Also known as /.itis

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if you're walking backwards.

Re:Also known as /.itis

[Anonymous Coward]

Davidwr's Disease is the cancer that's killing Slashdot!

Re:Also known as /.itis

[Korbeau]

/. IT Tits?! damn many of my male co-workers have this..

Of course for me it's all muscles! :)

The real history...

[Tenek]

Old news. The spread of HIV has already been well documented by Dr. Tom Lehrer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKZR3Bcj4jw

First post now thought to be dated 18:18PM

[davidwr]

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.

Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

I have always found it really hard to believe that even thus people have been having sex for thousands of years in the same way as we do now, the aids virus can be only 100 years old. There is more to it that their letting us to believe. The virus cant have just come out of know where,

The truth will come out some day , and no I dont believe elvis is alive or adolf is living in the north pole.

---------
liberta-togo.com

Re:Weird

[larry bagina]

It didn't come out of nowhere. If you believe in intelligent design, god created as punishment for being gay. If you believe in evolution, it mutated from something else (being an RNA/retrovirus, mutations are much more common).

Re:Weird

[DrDNA]

What they mean when they say the AIDS virus is 100 years old is that it was transmitted from apes (chimpanzees) to humans 100 years ago. The chimpanzee virus it came from is called SIV-cpz. It, in turn, evolved from other, related viruses. So it didn't just form out of whole cloth. It evolved from something related.

Re:Weird

[camperdave]

Ah, but maybe someone perverted enough to have sex with an infected monkey only comes around every 10,000 years or so.

Re:Weird

[4D6963]

Oh yeah, that's so surprising that in an era when people regularly have sex with people from different continents rather than people from different villages such a disease would spread across the globe.

Re:Weird

[Valdrax]

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:Weird

[TrashGod]

...having sex for thousands of years in the same way as we do now...

The way changed, probably recently: dry sex contributes to AIDS in Africa and elsewhere.

Re:Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

People probably paid for and are having sex with enslaved shaven monkeys or apes as we type.

Re:Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't go on line much, do you?

Re:Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

How else would I get laid?

Re:Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

How else would I get laid?

I dunno, sex with uninfected monkeys maybe? Learn to read.

Re:Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe somebody had a monkey steak... raw

Re:Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

That costs extra

Re:Weird

[fyoder]

Ah, but maybe someone perverted enough to have sex with an infected monkey only comes around every 10,000 years or so.

Ah, but how do you know the monkey is infected? Always have your monkey checked out by a vet prior to initiating intimacy.

Re:Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh really then? I supposed I'm hyper-evolved, as my capuchin lover can attest.

Re:Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

It is incorrect to say that a disease will eventually become 'tamed' and eventually only mildly infect its host. There is no future goal of a virus, or evolution. If a virus can successfully spread, and remain nasty there is no selective pressure to play nice with the host. Especially if you aren't the primary host. For example, E coli O157:H7 is pretty nasty in people but its reservoir is cows where it doesn't have an observable effect.

With the right combination of nastiness, transmission rate, incubation time and alternative hosts and nasty disease could continue to do quite well for a very long time.

Re:Weird

[bogjobber]

In the words of Dave Chappelle, "Nobody fucks monkeys and people, you idiot! You either fuck monkeys, or you fuck people. That's it. There's no in-between.

Re:Weird

[lagomorpha2]

"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." So how many more centuries until AIDS naturally becomes as benign as say herpes?

Re:Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not my fault she only ever seems to be in the mood on our decamillenial anniversary, you insensitive clod!

Re:Weird

[jimicus]

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.

Possibly, but one big difference between AIDS and a lot of the other conditions that you mentioned is that you've had plenty of time to pass it on to others before it kills you.

Maybe Duesberg was right

[R2.0]

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

[compro01]

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

[Zironic]

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:Maybe Duesberg was right

[kurisuto]

You don't spell out what the change in circumstances are, but I'd guess that you're referring to the sexual revolution of the 1970's and to the gay rights movement.

Actually, I think a strong case can be made that the real change is in attitudes, not behaviors. When the first quantitative studies of human sexual activity were done back in the early 1950's, it was shown that men were having sex with men a lot; more than anyone had guessed.

So a good case could be made that the drought-ridden forest has always been there, and it was just an matter of chance that the forest fire didn't happen sooner.

Re:Maybe Duesberg was right

[R2.0]

"requires certain circumstances (which didn't exist until relatively recently) to thrive effectively due to its specific limitations, such as its means of transmission."

Huh? You mean people weren't banging each other without condoms before the early 80's? Because I'm pretty sure teh history of sexually transmitted diseases goes wayyyy farther back than that.

Re:Maybe Duesberg was right

[MightyMartian]

What is so particularly different about HIV? It isn't the only pathogen out there that attacks the immune system. It's only real trick is that it isn't like some viruses, and doesn't kill within a few weeks, so it doesn't tend to burn itself out before it can spread.

What makes it rather unique is that in an age where we have an enormous number of very effective drugs for many diseases, it is still is pretty resistant compared to, say, syphilis. Syphilis was for centuries a scourge every bit as bad as HIV/AIDS. Folks with syphilis could infect a helluva lot of partners before the tertiary stage finally knocked them out. Until the development of sulfa drugs, there was no reliable treatment for it.

Re:Maybe Duesberg was right

[khallow]

I disagree. There were significant changes in the 60's that you aren't getting. First, airline travel was more widespread in the 60's. Second, there were people having unprotected sex with dozens or hundreds of partners. Sure that was going on in the 50's, but by the 70's there was a lot more possibilities for HIV infection to propagate. Finally, heroin use grew dramatically as the Vietnam War dragged on, providing a more reliable means for HIV infection via used needles.

Re:Maybe Duesberg was right

[Anonymous Coward]

Another big one would be travel. Not to say that people didn't travel before, but until commercial air travel, there was substantially less opportunity for transmissions between populations both nationally and internationally.

Re:Maybe Duesberg was right

[Anonymous Coward]

When the first quantitative studies of human sexual activity were done back in the early 1950's, it was shown that men were having sex with men a lot; more than anyone had guessed.

But their partners would probably have formed more closely connected sets than now, with less "new blood", if you'll pardon the slightly inappropriate choice of term....

Re:Maybe Duesberg was right

[bill_mcgonigle]

and then BLAMMO - instant deadliness

among people western science cared about

Re:Maybe Duesberg was right

[compro01]

I personally think the key thing is transportation. Never before has large-scale transportation been practical as it is today. You can jump on a plane and be practically anywhere in the world within a few hours. This is a massive boon to any sort of infectious disease, be it AIDS, flu, or even the common cold.

Another factor to consider is the population and relatedly, population density. Over the past century, and particularly over the past few decades, the population and the density of said population have been growing at a completely unprecedented rate. Over the past 50 years, the world population has doubled. Over the past 100 years, it has roughly quadrupled. Again, this is yet another boon for infectious disease.

While your circumstances are likely contributors, I think they are far overshadowed by rapid, long distance transportation and greatly increased population density.

Re:Maybe Duesberg was right

[kurisuto]

Let me give an illustrative anecdote here. Not long ago, I came across the autobiography of a gay man who joined the U.S. Navy in the late 1940's. He recounted the large number of sexual adventures he had in Japan, Korea, Germany, Austria, Italy, and the United States. I doubt very much that his story is unique.

It's true that air travel increased in the 1960's. It's probably also true that the average number sexual partners increased somewhat during that time (although people were also discuss sex more openly, so it's hard to say how much of the apparent increase is real).

Still, the original claim was that HIV requires certain circumstances which didn't exist until relatively recently. I'd claim that the circumstances did exist. The probabilities might have increased somewhat, but I think it could have happened earlier.

If the guy in the anecdote I mentioned had chanced to contract HIV, he very well could have been the vector who led to a larger outbreak much earlier. I think it's just an accident of history that that didn't happen.

Re:Maybe Duesberg was right

[plumby]

Well, given the theory in the article, I'd guess that the required circumstances were that the people killing and eating infected chimps were tending not to have too much sexual contact with most of the rest of the world.

You can bang someone else without a condom all you like, but if neither of you have got AIDS it's not going to magically appear.

Re:Maybe Duesberg was right

[BlackSnake112]

Also AIDS changes often. There is more then one kind of HIV. There was a study (in New York I think) that showed gay men with HIV were only have sex with other HIV infected people and some of those men had multiple kinds of HIV.

Could it be that what we now call HIV was something else and changed into HIV?

Re:Maybe Duesberg was right

[darkmeridian]

Airlines, easy world-wide travel, creation of the Pill and unprotected sex, a government unwilling to stymie the flow and treatment of GRIDS (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome) (later known as AIDS), gay culture, etc.

Re:Maybe Duesberg was right

[Free the Cowards]

So I'm curious, which poor lifestyle choices did Isaac Asimov make?

Re:Maybe Duesberg was right

[khallow]

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.

I don't get it. What makes you wonder? Are we supposed to question the foundations of science everytime someone comes up with a bit of knowledge that surprises us? Of course not. The disease is clearly much much older than a century. It must have been carried for millenia, perhaps even millions of years by primates. This new discovery improves our knowledge of how and when the disease originally came to infect humans. What it doesn't do is fundamentally change our understanding of the disease. My take is that the disease, when it came to infect humans, remained weak for a good portion of that time. Some mutations combined with a newly formed network of highly connected carriers (that is HIV infected people who have unprotected sex with a lot of other people) created the disease we now fear.

Re:Maybe Duesberg was right

[pokerdad]

A virus hangs around for a hundred years and then BLAMMO - instant deadliness.

How about, a virus hangs around for a hundred years, killing off people silently, in a way no one would ever think to investigate, then BLAMMO - we develop the technology to discover and investigate this virus?

Re:Maybe Duesberg was right

[richlv]

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.

tell that to ambulance person or somebody attacked on the street. that peter guy sounds like a religious/puritanic asshole. there goes my uninformed opinion ;)

Re:Maybe Duesberg was right

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe the focus on sex is a red herring, and it's really the dramatic increase in heroin use that caused AIDS to finally get noticed.

Re:Maybe Duesberg was right

[jsoderba]

As I understand it, epidemology is all about probability. You need a certain amount of infected individuals to have a certain risk of transmitting the disease to others before you can get a major epidemic. HIV hung around in the West African bush for decades, but until an infected person infected people in a high population, high risk group it was a minor problem. Changes in technology and society have a huge effect increasing travel and concentrating populations in large cities.

Re:Maybe Duesberg was right

[GWBasic]

I disagree. There were significant changes in the 60's that you aren't getting. First, airline travel was more widespread in the 60's. Second, there were people having unprotected sex with dozens or hundreds of partners. Sure that was going on in the 50's, but by the 70's there was a lot more possibilities for HIV infection to propagate. Finally, heroin use grew dramatically as the Vietnam War dragged on, providing a more reliable means for HIV infection via used needles.

Consider this: In Africa, in the out-of-the-way villages, people will often have 7-8 children. In such an isolated village, the entire village could live with a less deadly version of AIDS for many generations and evolve a tolerance. In theory, a village could live for many generations with a small percentage resilant enough to reproduce.

Thus, I think AIDS has been mutating in some out-of-the-way African villages for many generations without anyone knowing about it.

Re:Maybe Duesberg was right

[Anonymous Coward]

What got AIDS noticed is that it began attacking a disliked (immoral) yet powerful (driving the arts and thus controlling the culture) minority group. If there were a dreaded disease that attacked white males to the exclusion of other groups, the media would dutifully yawn.

Space born virus?

[Trikenstein]

HIV = Tunguska event?

Re:Space born virus?

[orclevegam]

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:Space born virus?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because the Russian Federation is really swarming with the virus, with a 1.1% infection rate. Try again, genius.

Re:Space born virus?

[scorp1us]

Clearly, not a likely scenario, but indulging...

The virus would not be viable at the near-impact site. It would have to be spread by the ejecta from the explosion, or a chunk that broke off and fell into the congo on its way to Russia. Given that it exploded before impact it is likely that internal pressures were causing debris to fall off all through the descent.

Arriving in the Congo, which is home to Bonobos, the most human-like ape, it infected them, then moved out from there.

Re:Space born virus?

[orclevegam]

Wow, I didn't actually expect a response, let alone a well thought out and reasoned one. Ok, well, that's a plausible explanation for how the Tunguska impact could be tied to the spread of a virus in Africa, but still doesn't explain some of the HIV like viruses that pre-date the Tunguska event and are speculated to be the pre-cursor to HIV. Unfortunately at this point we run up against an extreme lack of information as even the link between the simian strains of immune viruses and HIV is tenuous at best.

On a related note, is there any research into the viability of a virus in space? I know it's not strictly speaking alive, but it does possess a chemical structure as well as DNA (well, RNA) which would require protection from if nothing else radiation. Assuming it was inside whatever exploded in Tunguska (which we aren't even sure about), but was close enough to the surface of the object to be ejected prior to explosion, how much radiation would it have soaked up just getting to Earth?

Re:Space born virus?

[Dr. Spork]

The Congo really is pretty far from Eastern Siberia.

Re:Space born virus?

[mstahl]

Definitely an interesting thought, and there's been previous speculation about all viruses being space-borne. But if that were the case, why would it start out in the Congo rather than in Siberia?

Re:Space born virus?

[scorp1us]

Not when you've just made a trip from the kuiper belt. Distance is relative. Perhaps it was not off the actual comet itself, but part of the comets tail which followed. And that does seem to make some sense, becuse the congo is west of siberia, the planet rotates east, so there would be a few minutes of lag needed to get to the congo west of the impact.

Re:Space born virus?

[OldFish]

Tunguska sounds like an African nation. Probably a muslim one. We should've seen it coming. Damn that pre-911 mentality! We were weak, soft, blind to reality.

Re:FIST SPORT

[g0bshiTe]

True I'd have modded him + points simply for not posting AC.

Re:FIST SPORT

[Spatial]

Haha, look at his comment history.

Re:Wait, read much?

[megamerican]

Please don't mark this as troll or flamebait. It is a serious post about a serious topic.

I'm guessing you've never done any research on the subject.

You've probably never read Dr. Len Horowitz's book Emerging Viruses: AIDS And Ebola : Nature, Accident or Intentional?

You've probably never read NSSM 200 signed by Henry Kissinger where it states that the third world population is a national security threat to the US.

You may not have seen documents from the Congressional Record where people discuss creating "a synthetic biological agent, an agent that does not naturally exist and for which no natural immunity could have been acquired."

2. Within the next 5 to 10 years, it would probably be possible to make a new infective microorganism which could differ in certain important aspects from any known disease-causing organisms. Most important of these is that it might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon when we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease.

Or maybe you haven't read about the 1000's of times our government has tested biologicals, chemicals, radiologicals on its own citizens.

You also might want to read the law that allows the government to experiment on its own citizens just about anytime it wants.

(b) Exceptions
            Subject to subsections (c), (d), and (e) of this section, the
        prohibition in subsection (a) of this section does not apply to a
        test or experiment carried out for any of the following purposes:
                (1) Any peaceful purpose that is related to a medical,
            therapeutic, pharmaceutical, agricultural, industrial, or
            research activity.
                (2) Any purpose that is directly related to protection against
            toxic chemicals or biological weapons and agents.
                (3) Any law enforcement purpose, including any purpose related
            to riot control.

In 2000 The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) wrote a paper called Rebuilding America's Defenses. It talked about using race specific bioweapons as a useful tool.

advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.

PNAC is filled with top Bush administration officials, including Dick Cheney.
If you don't like any of my sources you are free to use google or any other source to verify that what I've said is true.

1908 also was the last time that the cubs won it a

[Joe The Dragon]

1908 also was the last time that the cubs won it all.

Happy birthday!

[MindlessAutomata]

Happy 100th birthday, HIV!

Re:Happy birthday!

[Anonymous Coward]

AIDS: The gift that keeps on giving.

Re:Happy birthday!

[Jesse Rudolph]

Yeah, happy birthday AIDS!!! What gift did we all get you? Hmm... well, heres AFRICA!!! WOOO!! Knew you would like it!

Re:Wait, read much?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am intrigued by your ideas and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:Wait, read much?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please don't mark this as troll or flamebait.

Indeed, "funny" is far more appropriate.

Re:Wait, read much?

[R2.0]

You also might want to read the law that allows the government to experiment on its own citizens just about anytime it wants.

(b) Exceptions
                        Subject to subsections (c), (d), and (e) of this section, the
                prohibition in subsection (a) of this section does not apply to a
                test or experiment carried out for any of the following purposes:
                                (1) Any peaceful purpose that is related to a medical,
                        therapeutic, pharmaceutical, agricultural, industrial, or
                        research activity.
                                (2) Any purpose that is directly related to protection against
                        toxic chemicals or biological weapons and agents.
                                (3) Any law enforcement purpose, including any purpose related
                        to riot control.

You might have quoted Sections C and D which are referenced:

(c) Informed consent required
            The Secretary of Defense may conduct a test or experiment
        described in subsection (b) of this section only if informed
        consent to the testing was obtained from each human subject in
        advance of the testing on that subject.
        (d) Prior notice to Congress
            Not later than 30 days after the date of final approval within
        the Department of Defense of plans for any experiment or study to
        be conducted by the Department of Defense (whether directly or
        under contract) involving the use of human subjects for the testing
        of a chemical agent or a biological agent, the Secretary of Defense
        shall submit to the Committee on Armed Services of the Senate and
        the Committee on Armed Services of the House of Representatives a
        report setting forth a full accounting of those plans, and the
        experiment or study may then be conducted only after the end of the
        30-day period beginning on the date such report is received by
        those committees.

Hardly "just about anytime it wants". So what else did you cherry pick from your other cites?

Re:FIST SPORT

[g0bshiTe]

LMFAO, that's too good.

Re:Wait, read much?

[a whoabot]

Aren't there samples from before 1969 when that "within the next 5 to 10 years" Senate testimony was made that have HIV within them? In fact, from TFA:

"Key to the new work was the discovery of an HIV sample that had been taken from a woman in Kinshasa in 1960. It was only the second such sample to be found from before 1976; the other was from 1959, also from Kinshasa."

Not knowing it's there doesn't mean it isn't.

[Eg0Death]

Since AIDS/HIV isn't the direct cause of death, it seems highly likely that when infected individuals died in the late 1800's/early 1900's the cause of death would be attributed (correctly) to the obvious illness (flu, pneumonia, consumption, dysentery). I'm no medical historian, but I'm fairly certain that the means to "find" the AIDS/HIV were not available.

Re:Not knowing it's there doesn't mean it isn't.

[4D6963]

If you bothered to RTFA, they can know for sure about when the epidemic started, i.e. when an infected person passed it on in a way that wouldn't die off, and they know that by comparing the genetic differences in their samples of HIV they have, importantly enough thanks to two samples from Congo from 1959 and 1960. So that's a fairly foolproof way to date the beginning of the epidemic.

Re:Not knowing it's there doesn't mean it isn't.

[Mortiss]

Agreed. Few facts: First virus discovered - 1899; Tobacco Mosaic Virus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus
First electron microscopes to observe virions: 1930's (same source).
Hence it is entirely possible that HIV related deaths simply went unnoticed, plus the possibility that it was largely confined to the areas where humans had been in contact with apes and thus could become infected with the virus that was able to jump species (which would be a very rare event on its own anyway)

Re:Not knowing it's there doesn't mean it isn't.

[Eg0Death]

I did RTFA, you insensitive clod, and I'm agreeing with it! Now go away or I will throw more /. memes at you!

Re:Not knowing it's there doesn't mean it isn't.

[Notquitecajun]

Not just that, I can imagine that the life expectancy in those areas was limited anyway, so you could die without knowing you ever had it or it ever really affecting you.

Re:Wait, read much?

[jollyreaper]

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.

So you think the government made AIDS in the 70s?

[Dr. Spork]

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.

Re:Wait, read much?

[R2.0]

"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:Also known as /.itis Not something we'd want

[davidsyes]

to say "Happy Birthday" to.

As for "Crossing Over" I... I.. I.. can SENSE a ... FEELING... (tilting head back, eyelids fluttering, arms up Kirk/Jesus/Charleton Heston-like) Where ARE YOU NOW?! I.. i.. i sense you there... you're ... you're shaped like a STRAND.... Yes, like a helix... sinewing through my system, coursing through my mortal veins... I... i.. i.. think we've met before...

Re:Wait, read much?

[Shirakawasuna]

You cite Horowitz as a reliable source? Have you ever even heard the man speak? Anyone with *any* rudimentary knowledge of HIV can see through his BS, when they're not laughing at his ignorance and fearing that people will actually listen to him. Just to see what happens what happens when an undergraduate science student can do with his ignorance, when he isn't acting like a raving lunatic, check Infidel Guy's interview with him and SA Smith: http://media.libsyn.com/media/infidelguy/Show14_Origins_of_HIV.mp3

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!

Conspiracy Paradox

[bill_mcgonigle]

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 machine soon to bring AIDS back to kill victim classes - I guess I didn't think that one through all the way. Oh, but it already exists, so there's no need to build it before we use the time machine. Damn, Conspiracy Paradox.

Re:Wait, read much?

[ConceptJunkie]

Yeah, I think "Fringe" is a cool show too.

Re:http://www.google.com/search?q=aids+hoax

[Gwala]

Spreading junk like that should really be a heinous crime. The idiots who believe that end up putting everyone else at greater risk.

Re:Wait, read much?

[Shirakawasuna]

I suppose it's too much to ask that you read and understand the law you're citing as well? The subsection (c) referenced clearly requires informed consent for *every* one of those exceptions. So no, not "just about anytime it wants", certainly not legally. The government, however, has been exposed for doing illegal experiments without informed consent before and we must be ever watchful of their activities.

Re:Weird And if you belive in REVolution/DEVo

[davidsyes]

lution, it could be the creation of homo-whormo-sapien 2.0.0.3.5-36-xbz

But, if you believe in creationism, you'd be remiss to not ask why free will was granted if HIV/AIDS were to be created as a punishment for what "God" apparently doesn't like. Sounds kinda stupid, to me. Sort like deliberately creating cars that WILL fail at the slightest operator whim, only to punish the car AND driver for transgressions that were known to be likely to happen.

I can only think of Depeche Mode's "Blasphemous Rumours" ....

Why in the HELLS create something, give it a free will, make it's immune system *relatively* robust, then create a disease/malfunction SPECIFICALLY to punish beings for same-gender emotional/recreational sex activities? Sure, reckless-abandon sex should not be rewarded when STDs can be passed all to easily. But, the logic of the "God's punishment for Gay sex" is absolutely, mind-bogglingly, immeasurably idiot. Why? Well, those who practice SAFE/monogamous or protected same-sex sex are ONLY going to contract HIV/AIDS by means OTHER than penile-anal/penile-vaginal congress.

If you believe in KARMA, then said people will come down with HIV/AIDS via random assault bitings or needle-jabs in crowded places where the attackers intentionally are infecting the public. But, such attackers can't possibly KNOW who IS and IS NOT gay/swinging sexual beings. Also, such people would get HIV/AIDS via botched/reckless blood transfusion. Yet, why is "God" punishing those who are newborns or toddlers or kids or young adults and other adults who DO NOT use recreational/addiction-based needle-transferred drugs? Is it then KARMA, which some religions will prefer to displace with God theory?

If "God" wanted, s/he/it could have created a universe (for us) in which our trials and travails didn't have HIV/AIDS, polio, herpes, and Hitler, Stalins, and other things and people to "make life on Earth interesting". Our sphere/bubble/microcosm could have been "MORE INTELLIGENTLY DESIGNED" with less bullshit, less bloodshed, and less God-damning, senseless, discombobulating forms of inanity and violence. We wouldn't have to be More Intelligently Designed as sheep, but things could have been DIFFERENT.

So, maybe Blasphemous Rumors is quite apropos a song, despite the RCC decrying the song. After all, what in Blasphemous Rumors can be challenged? What in the song is false or libelous or mis-representative of the world in which we live? Especially when "God" gave us many abilities to be "Flexible", and make us relatively stronger than a "Fly on the Windscreen"?

There's too much "God" in our daily lives and not enough compassion, humility, honesty, and sharing. Greed abounds, intermixed with wondrous and scary things, especially SCARY so-called God-driveling and God-driven leaders and wannabe leaders.

I think i rest my case.

Re:So you think the government made AIDS in the 70

[jeffasselin]

Don't forget Casaubon's Law:

"Any conspiracy theory must include the Knights Templar"

Re:Wait, read much?

[Shirakawasuna]

If this is a serious post about a serious topic, there's some serious delusion going on right here. Who thought it was a good idea to trust Horowitz? I can't seem to find my previous comment, but anyone interested in seeing how much smoke an antivaccinationist lunatic selling trinkets and water can blow to convince ignorant but well-meaning people into hurting themselves and their children, just go to his website. Or read what he's written and compare it to the reality of the situation, how HIV works, how vaccines work, how he distorts facts to inflate dangers and assign blame. Anyone with rudimentary knowledge of HIV and statistics can see the flaws in his argumentation, but if you're still interesting there's some easy things and some hard things you can do.

Easy things would be listening to what experts on the subjects have to say about him, people who have done actual lab work and put in the time studying to understand these things. Or you could listen to the "debate" on the Infidel Guy Show between him and SA Smith where the irrational, non-sequitur anger rises up multiple times. The hard thing would be actually learning about HIV itself, but it would also give you the knowledge necessary to speak in an informed matter on the topic and not have to make the oh-so-hard decision of believing scores of scientists from various fields versus a patent medicine quack.

Re:1908 also was the last time that the cubs won i

[Captain Splendid]

More proof that baseball, like HIV, is a scourge on humanity. Go play a real game!

Syph vs AIDS

[snspdaarf]

General rule of thumb: If you can kill it with antibiotics, it is bacterial. If you have to get the host to develop antibodies, it is viral.

Syph and AIDS are two different kinds of beastie.

Re:Syph vs AIDS

[MightyMartian]

I wasn't saying they were the same. I was saying that HIV is hardly the first beastie that became widespread and was, to one extent or another, incurable. What happened is that we had a half century lag between the last widespread incurable infectious agent and HIV, and so we have a few generations that truly find the idea of an incurable disease that at best can be managed but never truly eradicated pretty frightening.

Re:Syph vs AIDS

[snspdaarf]

Sorry. Long day, and the poster was cranky and not paying attention. He will be punished.

Props for the TL reference

[Overzeetop]

Any geek who doesn't know who Tom Lehrer is should turn his/her geek card in. He was (is) pure genius. Imagine my surprise a few years ago when I was channel surfing in LA to find him being interviewed on the local NPR station. I'd forgotten about the linked song..it's not on the three discs I have of him, nor in the songbook (I don't think).

Re:Weird And if you belive in REVolution/DEVo

[BlackSnake112]

Why in the HELLS create something, give it a free will, make it's immune system *relatively* robust, then create a disease/malfunction SPECIFICALLY to punish beings for same-gender emotional/recreational sex activities? Sure, reckless-abandon sex should not be rewarded when STDs can be passed all to easily. But, the logic of the "God's punishment for Gay sex" is absolutely, mind-bogglingly, immeasurably idiot. Why? Well, those who practice SAFE/monogamous or protected same-sex sex are ONLY going to contract HIV/AIDS by means OTHER than penile-anal/penile-vaginal congress.

It is only the male to male sexual relations that are being punsished. Female to female is allowed (and encouraged).

**Flame away

Basic Geography

[Anonymous Coward]

Kinshasa is the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, also known as the DRC or DR Congo. Congo (or the Republic of Congo) is an entirely different country. There is no Kinshasa, Congo.

Well, isn't that just dandy?

[cashman73]

That age is in full agreement with the right wing creationists' "young earth" theory, so they can still use AIDS as "God's punishment" to the gay community. Has Sarah Palin brought this up on the campaign trail, yet? ;-)

Re:Well, isn't that just dandy?

[not-my-real-name]

I knew a guy, married to one of my mom's cousins, who was a public health official, and probably a fundamentalist Christian. He said that if AIDS was God's punishment, then lesbians were God's chosen people.

Re:Wait, read much?

[scorp1us]

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.

of course you did

[commodoresloat]

That disease has your name all over it.

Re:Wait, read much?

[Anonymous Coward]

The burden of proof is on those who claim it is man-made, not those who claim it isn't likely to be.

Viral vs Bacterial Diseases

[bcwright]

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:Viral vs Bacterial Diseases

[Anonymous Coward]

Among the many viral diseases that are more prevalent in HIV/AIDS.

Warts including cervical and anal cancer - Human papilloma virus
CMV retinitis, colitis, etc - cytomegalovirus
Body cavity lymphoma, non-hodgkin's lymphoma - epstein-barr virus
Kaposi's sarcoma - human herpes virus 8
molluscum contagiosa - a poxvirus
shingles - varicella zoster virus

among others, fyi

Re:Viral vs Bacterial Diseases

[bcwright]

Certainly AIDS reduces the body's resistance to a number of viral diseases, as well as being generally debilitating so that those diseases will be more severe.

However the diseases you mention are generally either relatively minor (even if unpleasant), or also require significant incubation periods as well as additional infection vectors (viruses always require a host, usually of a specific species). Unlike viruses, many bacterial and fungal infectious agents can survive quite well outside the body, and therefore exposure to them would therefore be much more likely to occur in the kind of rural and tribal (and therefore insular) societies that we're talking about.

With apologies to Steve Martin...

[Anonymous Coward]

Grandpaaaaaaaaaaaa...banged a monkey!

Re:Wait, read much?

[bcwright]

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."

Congo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gorillas in the Mist, anyone?

Re:So you think the government made AIDS in the 70

[bcwright]

Also 9/11. That was after the fact, you say? What you're not taking into account was that there were all of these *SECRET RECORDS* in the towers that had to be destroyed one way or another. What better way than to pin the destruction on a bunch of Islamic extremists?

It all ties into the Illuminati and the Rosicrucians and Jesus' blood line through Mary Magdalene. It's a truly VAST conspiracy spanning dozens of centuries, I tell you!!

Oh hi there. You look like a nice chap with that white coat and all. What's that you say? You want me to go with you? Are you one of them too?

:-)

Re:FIST SPORT

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello twitter! You douche.

Re:Wait, read much?

[roystgnr]

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.

Anyone with an understanding of disease evolution?

[Lord Byron II]

Could someone please comment on whether it is more likely that the virus suddenly made the leap from primates to humans in the 1884-1924 range, or is it more likely that the virus slowly accumulated changes in its genetic code that allowed humans to become infected?

Could it have been that prior to this 1884-1924, that the primate version of the virus would be able to infect humans, but our immune systems were able to clear it? Or maybe that it could infect us, but its progression was so slow, that it never caused any illness?

Re:FIST SPORT

[Kell Bengal]

To answer your question, I'd say most people would have modded you down on the use of all capitals rather than content. Capitals are like YELLING and yelling never helps you make your point. Your ranty response also doesn't help matters, though.

Look: Large pharmaceutical companies used monkeys to make vaccines... & DOUBTLESS, some simians that were infected w/ the then called HTLV-III RETROVIRUS (OTHERWISE NOW KNOWN AS HIV)

Try again:

"Pharmaceutical companies used monkeys to make vaccines... and doubtless, some simians that were infected with the then called HTLV-III retrovirus (otherwise known as HIV)"

See? Now it sounds more like part of the considered argument you no doubt intended it to be and less like timecube.

Re:Wait, read much?

[MozeeToby]

an agent that does not naturally exist and for which no natural immunity could have been acquired.

Except that natural immunities do exist, they were first discovered when some people did not contract HIV despite having recieved multiple units of known to be tainted blood. HIV is also highly related to virusses which attach other species such as chimpanzees.

Finally, while maybe it would have been possible to create a virus at that time (and that is really stretching the imagination a bit) but I find it ludicris to believe that they could create a rapidly evolving virus which has gone uncured despite billions of dollars worth of research. Not to mention creating a virus that produces the incubation period, simptoms, and transmision methods you set out to create. We could maybe do these things now, if we put a significant (and by that I mean multi-billion dollar) effort behind them, but 40 years ago? I don't think so.

Re:Wait, read much?

[Anonymous Coward]

have fun playing with your timecube.

Doubtful...

[moxley]

I have seen way too much credible evidence that this disease was likely engineered to give creedence to this particular report - I've done quite a bit of reading about it on both sides of the issue and for now that is what I believe. I have put some links below the appropriations bill that cover some of the information, The records are there, and this appropriations bill is is just one of many, many things that seem to show this - including a flowchart that seems to show the development of AIDS as an engineered disease from 1971.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/3280929/Special-Virus-Program-AIDS-Flow-Chart-TOP-SECRET (Flowchart of the "Special Virus Cancer Program")

DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE APPROPRIATIONS FOR 1970

HEARINGS BEFORE A SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
NINETY-FIRST CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
SUBCOMMITTEE ON DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE APPROPRIATIONS

H.B. 15090

PART 5
RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT, TEST, AND EVALUATION

Department of the Army
Statement of Director, Advanced Research Project Agency
Statement of Director, Defense Research and Engineering

Printed for the use of the Committee on Appropriations
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
WASHINGTON : 1969
UNITED STATES SENATE LIBRARY

[pg.] 129 TUESDAY, JULY 1, 1969

SYNTHETIC BIOLOGICAL AGENTS

There are two things about the biological agent field I would like to mention. One is the possibility of technological surprise. Molecular biology is a field that is advancing very rapidly and eminent biologists believe that within a period of 5 to 10 years it would be possible to produce a synthetic biological agent, an agent that does not naturally exist and for which no natural immunity could have been acquired.
MR. SIKES. Are we doing any work in that field?
DR. MACARTHUR. We are not.
MR. SIKES. Why not? Lack of money or lack of interest?
DR. MACARTHUR. Certainly not lack of interest.
MR. SIKES. Would you provide for our records information on what would be required, what the advantages of such a program would be, the time and the cost involved?
DR. MACARTHUR. We will be very happy to.
(The information follows:)

The dramatic progress being made in the field of molecular biology led us to investigate the relevance of this field of science to biological warfare. A small group of experts considered this matter and provided the following observations:
1. All biological agents up the the present time are representatives of naturally occurring disease, and are thus known by scientists throughout the world. They are easily available to qualified scientists for research, either for offensive or defensive purposes.
2. Within the next 5 to 10 years, it would probably be possible to make a new infective microorganism which could differ in certain important aspects from any known disease-causing organisms. Most important of these is that it might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease.
3. A research program to explore the feasibility of this could be completed in approximately 5 years at a total cost of $10 million.
4. It would be very difficult to establish such a program. Molecular biology is a relatively new science. There are not many highly competent scientists in the field. Almost all are in university laboratories, and they are generally adequately supported from sources other than DOD. However, it was considered possible to initiate an adequate program through the National Academy of Sciences - National Research Council (NAS-NRC).
The matter was discussed with the NAS-NRC, and tentative plans were plans were made to initiate the program. However decreasing funds in CB, growing criticism of the CB program, and our reluctance to involve the NAS-NRC in such a controversial endeavor have led us to postpone it for the past 2 years.

Mods on Crack

[Free the Cowards]

It's a tremendously sad commentary on this site that you got moderated Informative/Insightful instead of Funny.

Well then...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your parents caused your death by not providing you with a perfect immune system.

Re:Wait, read much?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is also moronic to try to kill off "the poor". [...] J. K. Rowling was poor, now she is rich.

And just think of the awful books the world would've been spared if we killed the poor.

AIDS is not a virus. It's the *effect* of a fungus

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't you noticed that people who are extremely sexually active have depressed immune systems? I have friends that have had no sexual contact with anyone but theirselves, and have detracted to a flavor of AIDS that they remedied with certain herbs ministered over 2 months. The reason why we are seeing the 1970's as the arrival dates of the major outbreaks of disease is because that is when the manipulation of nutrition, water, and medicine begain pursuant to the United Nations Agenda 21 which states that the initial terms of entry of the United States into the Pan American Union facilitated through the Trans-Texas Trade Corridor is for a 70% reduction in population with exemption to native tribes on the continents. Now, if there were any continental United Statesmen still alive in their movements of home rule, then they would be under the exemption clause because they are considered just as indian as the indians outside the United States of America in admiralty acknowledged in USCode Title 27 Section 3002, 15(b) "United States means...a federal corporation." The majority of fungus is not a symbiotic relationship to a man, though there are exceptions such as Jesus the Christ and Lucifer the Shatan.

Every death releases a bond in admiralty for that person instrumentalized by the corporate UNITED STATES; for about USD 45 million, known as the measured potential currency to be generated and moved indirectly by profitable product, however only a fraction of that is payed to that artificial person as the dividend to the father corporation United States. Anyone brought into court for those proceedings are covered under "Trust 72", which so-far has manipulated the people to become that artificial person in trust, even so-far as manifesting the disabilities and death from releasing the bond.

Of'course, the fungus gets exported to Africka so the home rule over there can glean its population from any mental awakening, and making Liberia a fit example of freedom and liberty so as to encourage slavery and oppression.

allergies

[Britz]

Autoimmune disease is on the rise. I would bet on that.
Or some other "modern" disease.

Belief in Intelligent Design

[Voyager529]

and the belief that AIDS is God's punishment toward gay people are independent of each other. I believe in Intelligent Design, but that doesn't mean that I believe that this is a means of God punishing people. God could use any number of means to accomplish this, so why would He use a disease that has infected straight people as well? Joey

In theory, maybe. In practice, absolutely not.

[jbeach]

It would be great if changing people's behaviors were anywhere near that easy. But changing peoples' behaviors is just about the most difficult thing you can try. And especially when you're talking about sex - it's wired directly into the brain, body and mind. So this whole notion of "stop fucking" is in direct conflict with millions of years of hardware **and** software.

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:AIDS is not a virus. It's the *effect* of a fun

[Anonymous Coward]

I like your Time Cube page better.

Re:AIDS is not a virus. It's the *effect* of a fun

[NotmyNick]

RANT

There's medication for that.

Re:AIDS is not a virus. It's the *effect* of a fun

[Fred_A]

I too blame it on a conspiracy that perverted our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual.

By the way, General Ripper, I am elated to see that you are alive and well. And I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:Weird And if you belive in REVolution/DEVo

[davidsyes]

WHY am i suddenly reminded of Whamo-O's "Slip 'n Slide"?

Re:FIST SPORT

[notamisfit]

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:FIST SPORT

[Anonymous Coward]

So, you HAVE heard of the vaccines built from simians, which makes the modded down posters' viewpoint as good as any (considering the fact that nobody truly knows where it came from), and, that HTLVIII was used as a term for what is now called HIV. You people modded down somebody that wasn't wrong (or right) or trolling either. This alone speaks worlds for the too trackable sheep/lemmings that infest /. (otherwise known as "registered users", alias lemmings & sheep that need to be "part of the team" etc. et al because they're too weak to stand by themselves. We all know that kind. Stick together "frat boys" there is "strength in numbers" and especially even if we are wrong as wrong gets - we can use our "b.s. the masses via strength in numbers" P.R. tactics! Give us a break)

Re:So you think the government made AIDS in the 70

[Anonymous Coward]

The Illuminati developed a cure for AIDS, and placed it in a microchip in Kennedy's brain. The 1963 "microchip," however, soon exploded.

Chimps seem to be

[Anonymous Coward]

the cause of everything living on this planet so we should put them all in the same location and examine them everyday to see what new things come from them or what they turn into before our eyes. Who knew chimps were so popular with the unevolved? Not only are they factories for simple organisms but they can spontaneously turn into new species!

Re:FIST SPORT

[Tenebrousedge]

You are a frequent sender of slashdot disagree mail, soon to be featured as part of an Idle post, and I claim my five pounds!

Re:So you think the government made AIDS in the 70

[Anonymous Coward]

The Knights Templar knew about Jesus' blood line! The muslim terrorists discovered one of the Knights Templar ancient relics and learned that Kennedy was the last living descendant of Jesus, and tried to kill him. However, the Illuminati were aware of the terrorists evil plan, and since they needed Kennedy alive as a pawn in their own scheme of world-domination, they invented the HIV-virus, and traveled back in time to release it in Africa, predicting that it would spread to the middle-east and kill the muslims before they had a chance to discover the relic. However a crazy nazi scientist invented a device to accurately predict future events. When he learned the nazis were going to lose the war he decided to take revenge on the country that decided the outcome of the war: the USA! The crazy nazi scientists liked irony so he brainwashed the jews in the concentration camps to create Israel when the war was over. The unforseen presence of the jews in the middle-east disrupted the spread of aids in that part of the world, instead it spead to the USA where it killed a brilliant homosexual man named 'Fred', who was to become the architect of the world trade center in the original future from the time-travelling Illuminati. The man who replaced Fred in the future that we now know as our past was an idiot, and when therefor the terrorists attacks on the WTC unexpectedly destroyed the towers, again suprising the Illuminati. To regain control of the world they implanted a mind-control device in the cheeks of a man who was running for president, we know this man as John McCain...

Think about it...

Re:Wait, read much?

[toiletsalmon]

"Poor" would actually be more of an ethnic/socio-economic thing. For example, in my college days, it was VERY unlikely that I would have been able to "make friends" with any hot "WASP" chicks because we didn't (and still don't) muddle about in the same social circles. It's exactly the same way that I don't get to hang out with so called "A list" celebrities. We don't know the same people, and our friends, generally, don't know the same people.

If any of these other groups of people I just mentioned were to mysteriously contract some sort of disease, I wouldn't have to much to worry about because I have virtually NO exposure to any of these people in real life.

In many cultures, you have similar situations, so it is quite feasible to have a disease that primarily targets "poor" people, depending on the circumstances.

Additionally, airplanes and things of that nature don't necessarily have much of a bearing on transmission of a disease that is passed primarily by some sort of "intimate" contact.

Re:FIST SPORT

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh good lord... "NOOoooo'sss", lol!

Mercy me, NOT THAT...

(That's it, life's over, my goal of being featured on the "idle hour on the disagree page" is about to "come twoo")

You know, IF you knew who I really was, that might matter... but, you don't (the benefits of "A/C" status, right there, in a nutshell)

Yup, keep being "elitist registered users" & "part of the 'in-crowd team'" - it's noble work you're doing, especially since you allow me to (if I wished to do so) track you around here bugging you, endlessly, if I wished (but, I have better things to do, so - you lucked out).

Re:FIST SPORT

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi APK :)

Re:FIST SPORT

[arbitraryaardvark]

what's the term for that?
some sort of reverse karma whore.

"History of AIDS" book

[602]

Grmek's History of AIDS from 1993 is quite good and interesting.

Obligatory Car Analogy

[Poppler]

If both you and your partner were virgins until your first sexual encounter with each other, and have a lifelong, drug-free relationship until both of your natural (or accidental) deaths, the chance of either of you contracting AIDS is statistically zero.

If you never get in a car or walk down a public road, the odds of dying in a collision approaches zero. So unless you walk or bike everywhere you go, it's your own fault if some drunken bastard going 50 over rear-ends you, right?

Car accidents cost the public a lot of money. Shouldn't we be sending your widow the bill for scraping your remains off the highway? After all, you choose to engage in risky behavior (driving), why should I pay to clean up your mess?

Re:Horowitz interview

[bcwright]

Just to see what happens what happens when an undergraduate science student can do with his ignorance, when he isn't acting like a raving lunatic, check Infidel Guy's interview with him and SA Smith: [...]

Yikes!! I just listened to the interview, and this Horowitz guy is a lunatic. He tries to make a big deal about how a couple of his papers were published in a "peer reviewed" scientific journal, and that this somehow proves that his claims are all true. But anyone who's read very many scientific journal articles (in whatever field) knows that the mere fact that an article was published doesn't say much about whether it's true: Maybe the data were contaminated in some way unbeknownst to the researcher. Maybe the author designed the experiment poorly or did the analysis improperly. Maybe the results are simply an anomaly (the improbable thing will happen with exactly that probability). Maybe someone (possibly not even the author) falsified the results. Moreover some journals are simply more well-known in the relevant field, while others are obscure, and this will affect the quality of articles accepted by that journal in that field.

Researchers and authors make mistakes and often have axes to grind. Ditto with reviewers. Ditto even with journals themselves. The system doesn't guarantee that every article ever published is worth even the paper it's written on, rather it tries to ensure that articles generally meet certain minimal standards in terms of their procedures, results, and analysis. Sometimes bad articles get in, and sometimes good ones get rejected. There's nothing magical about the mere fact of having been published; reviewers can't possibly be expected to catch everything.

Moreover when listening to the interview I get the distinct impression that Dr. Horowitz doesn't even understand the problems that the other participants raised with his thesis. Some of the issues raised were pretty damning, yet all he seemed able to do was to complain about being treated unfairly and to repeat the same assertions in a louder voice - usually a very bad sign.

My opinion is that if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then it is most likely really a duck. Dr. Horowitz gives every appearance of being a fraud.

Re:FIST SPORT

[Anonymous Coward]

Hehehe... "the force is with you/your ESP is on 'high' setting" (or, is it?) - "inquiring minds, want to know" (the nice part of being "A/C" is this, nobody knows - & I cannot be 'tracked' here typically (unless its the mods/owners, who have access to their logs of who is coming from where etc.)

& even then? Heh, they'd have to shut out an entire body of an large ISP/BSP to do it, & then?

Well - I just shift to ANOTHER set to get in here & post, to circumvent bans/10 post "A/C" limits, OR via anonymous proxy servers (of which many are shut out by /., which I have seen done, which was fairly "impressive" on their end).

I think the mods here leave me be, because it would be shutting out a huge ISP/BSP to do so, & I never really cause any "major havoc" here (other than "blowing by" the "A/C" post limits they impose, which is no big deal anyways)

Re:Wait, read much?

[Anonymous Coward]

Katrina was a red herring. Remember? Bush did it intentionally.

Re:"God's punishment"

[bcwright]

Huh? I don't follow your logic at all. The earlier prevailing view was that the disease passed into the human population much later; if the earlier view had been that the disease had been in the human population for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, and was now thought to be much more recent, then you might have a point. As it is, at best all you can say is that neither view explicitly contradicts the "young earth" theory, while providing no additional support whatsoever either for or against the theory.

Besides, even if you might be inclined to see such things as evidence of God's wrath, it is difficult to picture how this could be reconciled with a Christian world view. Why would an all-powerful and just God make such an imperfect instrument for which such a large proportion of the victims were not gay? Or why would a loving God create a temporal punishment like AIDS that offers no hope of escape even for those who repent?

Re:Horowitz interview

[Shirakawasuna]

Absolutely! However, that duck-walker also walks like a liar, so he may not even have a truly "peer-reviewed" publication to his name. Doing a little googling, it seems ERV (SA Smith, who is awesome) already did the work for me!

Horowitz is published in a 'journal' called "Medical Hypotheses", a publication which makes it very apparent that they publish *anything* that catches their interest and that peer-review and being in concordance with observation/theory are not requirements for publication. In other words, yes Horowitz is probably lying about this one, as he does about nearly everything. It's really tough not to dislike the guy: he tries to convince people that medically-tested and effective treatments will hurt them so he can sell them his quack nonsense and get attention.

I'm happy that you were able to find out so much about him, though! I usually feel like my attempts to 'get the word out' aren't read :).

Re:FIST SPORT

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to (although anonymously) bare witness to that in swedish elementary schools, news and the public debate, it was indeed called HTLV-III until sometime in the late 80's.

Re:FIST SPORT

[dotancohen]

True I'd have modded him + points simply for not posting AC.

+5 Balls

Political Correctness?

[Msdose]

I am sure that, if the newly discovered epidemic had been something like smallpox, the scientific response would have been to quarantine the victims to prevent transmission. Obviously this didn't happen because it was argued by the politically correct that it contravened the right of the gay community to continue their lifestyle unimpeded. The outcome of this decision will be hundreds of millions dying a horrible death that could have been prevented if it wasn't for political correctness.

Re:Political Correctness?

[conureman]

I've often thought that more care should be given to reducing our import quotas of tropical and Asian pathogens. A rather non-trivial problem naturally.

Re:Political Correctness?

[KudyardRipling]

What nation is the second largest holder of US government debt and has the largest trade surplus with the USA?

Re:Wait, read much?

[monktus]

JK Rowling poor? Puhlease. As much as I (guiltily) enjoy her books, the only reason that the myth of her being a destitute single mother is propagated is lazy journalism whenever she is mentioned in the press.

Rowling came from a wealthy family and as far as I remember gained a first in Classics at university. It's true that she ended up being a single mother, which is never an easy situation, however she lived with a well off member of her family in a fairly salubrious part of Edinburgh and the cafe she wrote Harry Potter in was, again, owned by a relative.

While she's done well for herself, an upper-middle-class-fashionably-yet-comfortably-slumming-it to riches story just doesn't have the appeal of a rags to riches story. And don't get me started on that donation to New Labour.

Re:Horowitz interview

[bcwright]

As it happens this thread was the first I'd heard about Horowitz. Possibly I'd have known something about him if AIDS research or treatment were my specialty, but it's not.

However his name is plastered all though Google if you just do a search for "Horowitz AIDS". His own websites http://www.tetrahedron.com and http://www.healthyworldstore.com show up very high on the list, and have all the earmarks of quackery.

By the way, for anyone who stumbles across this and hasn't heard about him, his only doctoral degree is apparently in dentistry - hardly a closely-related field. I certainly wouldn't dismiss anyone's research merely because their degree was in a different field (many researchers start out in one field and later move on into another one or even into several others over their lifetime), however it is telling that he uses that degree as a club against any opponents, claiming that it somehow gives anything he writes legitimacy.

But in a real scientific endeavor, the thing that will give your work the most legitimacy isn't your degree, or even how many papers you have published, but how many other researchers in the field cite your results, especially prominent ones. That's the ultimate endorsement of your work.

Your analogy fails

[voraciousreader]

There is no equivalent of prophyllactics for drug use.

There is no "heroin condom" to prevent (to a high statistical certainty) the long term effects of drug use.

So when I see posts like yours, I wonder, why do the "sex is a reflex" people not delve into this?

It always seems to come down to the same binary "don't fuck strangers/I'll fuck whatever I like however I like" argument, which doesn't even come close to representing the reality of the situation.

Ultimately, I'm going to speculate that a large number of people who got aids from sex were not wearing a condom when they got it.

So, as a responsible society, I think it's perfectly valid to hold the "victims" somewhat accountable. They refused to take the most basic precaution, so their right to be outraged about having their behavior questioned is kind of diminished as a result.

And please, don't bother replying with "what about babies/iv drug users/ignorant partners" red herrings. I'm specifically talking about people who got AIDS through unprotected, consensual sexual activity, no one else.

Re:Your analogy fails

[HungryHobo]

"I'm specifically talking about people who got AIDS through unprotected, consensual sexual activity, no one else."
But the ignorant partners could very well have got AIDS through unprotected, consensual sexual activity. Say they're trying for a child but their partner was less than faithful?
That's not a red herring.
Is it their fault as well?

Fucking holier than thou moralistic assholes.
Unless you've never had sex then your belief that you are somehow proof against getting it hinges entirely on your partner being as faithful as you think they are.

Re:Your analogy fails

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus, did you read what he said? God you're a fucking idiot.

Re:Your analogy fails

[jbeach]

There is no equivalent of prophyllactics for drug use.

Actually, there is. It's clean needles. And in fact, combating the spread of disease by giving away clean needles to addicts, has had a far better effect on reducing disease through drugs than the "Just Say No" solution.

Which applies back to combating the spread of AIDS by changing people's sexual behavior. It's far easier to convince someone to use a condom when they fuck, than to convince them not to fuck **and actually have them follow through on it**.

But just as clean needles don't cure drug addiction, only some harm from it - so condoms don't cure AIDS **or** the underlying behaviors that lead to the spread of AIDS. It just limits the damage.

Now, I totally agree you with you that those who engage in risky behaviors bear responsibility for the results. But even if you "don't want me to bother replying" with the point of innocent AIDS victims - that's the WHOLE point of why we try to stop the spread of AIDS! And why your stance of "it's their behavior, it's their fault, try to change the behavior rather than cure the disease" simply doesn't work.

Which doesn't even address other impacts of AIDS sickness. What happens to someone's family when a member gets AIDS? Even if it's "all his fault" - how does he support his family? What do they do? How do they pay their bills? If we can prevent him from dying of AIDS **even if** it's "all his fault", then we benefit our entire society - he can continue to have a healthy productive life. pay taxes. Contribute to resources. And if he was supporting a family, now they won't have to struggle to survive. Which means his kids can go to college, and grow up and better themselves - all of which benefits all of us.

So, besides the moral issue of wanting to help someone even if it's "all their fault", just because they're a fellow human being, there's a host of pragmatic reasons to help as well.

This is a disease that's in our society. It affects all of us. Sure, we can and should encourage condom use and less risky sexual behaviors. But that by itself will not solve the spread of the disease **to innocents** in our society - and all the secondary problems that it causes as well.

Re:FIST SPORT

[Anonymous Coward]

And, as the Brits say? "Bob's your Uncle" (translated to U.S. English? "There you have it") - still more proof that the "great registered users" are NOT 'perfect', though they'd like to THINK they are, because they are "part of the team/in crowd" here, the totally trackable one no less, here @ /. ...

Re:So you think the government made AIDS in the 70

[bluephone]

See, it's comments like these that show how ignorant the public is. The moon landings weren't faked. We went to the moon to GET samples of HIV and unleash it on the enemies of good Christians! It's actually the Selenite common cold, but has much worse effects on humans, as discovered by a Doctor Cavor.

Re:Katrina

[bcwright]

Katrina was a red herring. Remember? Bush did it intentionally.

I know you're being sarcastic, but I've certainly heard people say things like that who were quite serious. One should never attribute to malice what can be better laid on incompetence or indifference.

And, unfortunately, there was not a SINGLE elected Government official, of either party, at either the Federal, State, or local level, who responded effectively to the Katrina disaster. Were all of them evil people? By no means - Like most governments in all times and in all places, they were all just ineffective.

Sorry if that doesn't go along with anyone's political preconceptions, but it appears to be true, unfortunately.

OMG

[conureman]

I suppose it is my own fault, since I don't filter my discussion, but I gather this subject is a honeypot for trolls. Aren't we droll. Good shunt for the hyper-critical troll seeking moderators.

Welcome to the tropics

[conureman]

You didn't mention climate change. Of course it's all hypothetical at this time, but factoring together population growth and mobility with the northern advance of the noxious insects, maybe some mountain cabin with ku klux krazy neighbors might not be so bad an idea, at that.

Re:FIST SPORT

[Darby]

+5 Balls

Wouldn't that make walking a tad awkward?

Edward Hooper "The River"

[RGRistroph]

The hypothesis on the origin of HIV that best fits all the facts we have, is outlined in a book titled "The River" by Edward Hooper. This new evidence, including the new tissue sample (not the oldest found) and the analysis of genetic divergence, is consistent with that theory.

It is disappointing that a forum such as slashdot can discuss this new announcement and no one mentions "The River" at all. A number of well thought out posts in here show reasonable familarity with the subject of HIV and biology in general, complete with links to sources, and that those people do not make any reference to the Edward Hooper / Tom Curtis hypothesis about Hilary Koprowski's testing of an oral polio vaccine on human subjects is kind of scary. Posts about HIV being a plot to kill blacks and gays get more credibility.

The hypothesis is that SIV or another HIV ancestor was collected from chimpanzee liver cells in the mid-1950s, and a live but weakened polio vaccine was grown on cultures of those cells in an attempt to make a polio vaccine. The process would involve repeatedly re-infecting a fresh culture of the cells growing on the glass of a bottle containing nutriants, and then the fluid would be filtered for anything as big as a bacteria or cell but viruses would pass through, and then the process would be repeated. This would compress many generations of genetic selection into a short time frame, and any viruses already present in the chimpanzee, could pass through the process with the modified polio virus and make it into the vaccine. The a "seed" of the live vaccine polio was then sent to Africa, where it was grown into a larger volume on more chimpanzee liver cultures, possibly locally collected. Then, in an attempt to compete with the other polio vaccines by making a safety-theater production, about 3 million Congolese were administered the vaccine with the help of the Belgian colonial government. I call it safety-theater because they (Hillary Koprowski and the people pushing his vaccine) apparently wanted to quote the 3 million figure to sell their product, but they didn't go back and check to see if any of those 3 million got sick or even if those people did or did not get polio.

Details of all this are hard to ferret out, given that the people involved are either dead or have dim memories due to the passage of time.

There is other circumstantial evidence. The polio vaccine in question was tested in other places, such as homes for retarded children and "wayward girls" (unmarried teenage mothers). Some of those people died with strange AIDS like symptoms. No early sample of HIV doesn't come from a place where the polio vaccine was tested. Early samples of HIV show the most genetic variation in the geographic area exposed to that polio vaccine.

There is circumstantial evidence against competeing theories: the theory that it crossed over in the 1930s or before, and took a while to spread, the theory that it crosses over on a regular basis throughout human-chimp history but only in modern times was the behaviour of humans such that it would spread in our population, etc. For details read the book.

There will probably never be positive proof, we can only note that over time this theory is not disproven, and look at the balance of circumstantial evidence.

This new study is consistent with the polio vaccine origin theory. A sample of HIV from before the polio vaccine tests, which would conclusively disprove the polio vaccine origin, is not produced. The new sample that is produced shows a "genetic distance" from the supposed original sample that is consistent with a number of related chimpanzee viruses being in the liver cells, and with the compressed selection process that produces an attenuated (weakened) vaccine virus strain from the live dangerous polio virus strain -- both factors are also consistent with the other AIDS-like cases in polio test subjects and the variation in early HIV samples from Africa.

I guess some people in the medical industry didn't like this

Re:Edward Hooper "The River"

[Renraku]

The people that owned slaves have also long since died out, but that doesn't keep their possible descendants demanding money from the descendants of the slave owners.

Re:Edward Hooper "The River"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but if someone asks why the US has a larger percentage of the population that is black than Canada, slavery is mentioned. Similarly, if where HIV came from is the topic of discussion, the oral polio vaccine tests have to at least come up in the conversation. If a child asks you how the moon goes around the earth, do you manage to have that converstation without mentioning gravity ?

kaposi

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it was known to science all along, we just don't realize it? One of the external symptoms is kaposis sarcoma. Moritz Kaposi, the first pathologist to describe this sign, died in 1902.

Re:Wait, read much?

[Anonymous Coward]

oh, please, if the richies kills all the poors nuisances, who will mine the steel for they swooshing blingy cars?

Re:So you think the government made AIDS in the 70

[Anonymous Coward]

We went to the moon to GET samples of HIV and unleash it on the enemies of good Christians!

That's impossible. The only good Christian is a pile of lion shit.

Your reading comprehension fails

[voraciousreader]

"But the ignorant partners could very well have got AIDS through unprotected, consensual sexual activity. Say they're trying for a child but their partner was less than faithful?
That's not a red herring.
Is it their fault as well?"

No, genius, that's why I specifically excluded them from my comments. You should have read that.

Don't reply until you atually read and understand what you're replying to, please. You didn't this time.

Re:Your reading comprehension fails

[jbeach]

You're trying to exclude something from discussion, which invalidates your argument. But the fact that you want to exclude it, doesn't mean that others have to.

And if you are taking a stance of "if irresponsible people get AIDS, it's all their fault anyway", and the overall discussion is what works about stopping the spread of AIDS - this is a point that bears discussion.

To take on another metaphor: let's say we live an city, and one idiot falls asleep smoking in his bed. Should we put out the fire in his house?

Of course, he bears responsibility for being that stupid. BUT if we don't put out his fire, it could kill his family too, and then spread to others who just happen to live nearby.

Should we just tell everyone not to smoke in their beds? of course. But will that put out the fire once it's started, or keep it from spreading? No. We need a fire department for that.

Re:FIST SPORT

[Anonymous Coward]

http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=982275&no_d2=1&cid=25230103

Take a read, "wise registered user" & realize 1 thing - being a 'registered member/part of the team/in crowd' here? Didn't make you any more correct than before, & actually INCORRECT, as to HTLV-III being the term for HIV, before it became the "std. term" nowadays.

Amazing. Proof's in the pudding, once more proving MY point, for me.

Re:Wait, read much?

[Anonymous Coward]

You just explained HOW the conspiracies work: they *don't* have to cover their tracks, they just have to call anyone who does have knowledge of it a "conspiracy theorist"

Re:Wait, read much?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

No, no, no! That's what they want you to think!

There's a second government working from the shadows. The purpose of the one you refer to is just to make the government look incompetent so that we'd never discover the truth.

No, clean needles are not equivalent

[voraciousreader]

Clean needles are not equivalent, as they do not protect you from the long term effects of drug abuse, they only help you avoid infectious diseases.

There is no equivalent to condoms for drug abuse.

I stopped reading after I saw your analogy failed, and that you were determined to argue with straw men and red herrings.

Good bye.

Re:No, clean needles are not equivalent

[jbeach]

Cheers. :) Hopefully you will be able to someday understand that blaming some victims, and ignoring all the innocent victims because they're inconvenient, doesn't by itself actually solve any problems.

Re:No, clean needles are not equivalent

[jbeach]

Now that I think I understand you a bit better, please disregard my previous reply.

I had actually thought you were the original poster, and trying to evade our original discussion; now that I look at your ID, it's clear you're a different person. My apologies for misunderstanding this.

I can understand your complaint about the metaphor used; it is not exact. Of course no metaphor can be exact, or it would be identical; but if it turns out we actually still have a disagreement, I will try to come up with a different metaphor that explains my stance while addressing your complaints.

Your points all fail

[voraciousreader]

"You're trying to exclude something from discussion, which invalidates your argument."

That's ridiculous, excluding "people who had their partners sleep around on them without them knowinbg" in no way invalidates the argument that "people who fuck anything that moves with no protection have some culpability if they get infected".

That point is just vapid.

"But the fact that you want to exclude it, doesn't mean that others have to."

It does if you want to have a discussion about whether "people who fuck anything that moves with no protection have some culpability if they get infected" is a valid argument, as that is the only point I was making.

"And if you are taking a stance of "if irresponsible people get AIDS, it's all their fault anyway"

I didn't, nor got anywhere near it. Your straw man fails.

"and the overall discussion is what works about stopping the spread of AIDS - this is a point that bears discussion."

It wasn't. The overall point was ""people who fuck anything that moves with no protection have some culpability if they get infected".

Not all of the responsibility Mr. Straw Man, some. Some. Some as in, yes, on occasion, you can blme the victim.

Do you know why I politely asked that those parameters be observed? Because this discussion inevitably boils down to someone like you screeching about "aids babies" or some such, appealing to emotion in order obscure the fault of people who did it to themselves.

The worst part is that you called me an asshole, but it was your own failed reading that made you misunderstand the point, and the post itself. Or maybe it's the best part, I dunno.

Re:Your points all fail

[jbeach]

OK, wow.

First, perhaps we both just need to get clear on where we're discussing things from.

It appears to me that you're coming from the direction of "If that had unsafe sex, that guy should accept responsibility for how he got AIDS." Now, as I've said, I actually don't have much of a problem with that, as far as it goes.

So, is that your argument? If it is, please let me know; if it is not, or if there is more to it, please feel free to correct me on that. I want to know where you're coming from, especially if I'm wrong.

As for me, I'm coming from the point of view of, "OK, yes, it is definitely that guy's responsibility. Now, what are we going to do about it, so his disease doesn't badly affect the rest of us?" Because it **does** affect the rest of us, even though we are probably making wiser choices.

Also, what you may not realize in **your** response to *my* original metaphor, is that I was responding to a discussion was about what should be done to **treat** AIDS. The original poster claimed that attempting to change behavior would be more affective in reducing the spread of AIDS, than actually investing in research to cure the disease.

So my metaphor was about how you can't just **convince** people out of a risky behavior. Even though it's horrible. Now, they bear their own responsibility for not taking charge of their lives, and exercising their free will **over** the hardware and software in their brains and bodies. I'm not a devotee of Skinner - I believe free will *does* exist, even though our inherited hardware and software may make it difficult.

Not all of the responsibility Mr. Straw Man, some. Some. Some as in, yes, on occasion, you can blme the victim.

OK. So it may actually be that we have no disagreement.

The worst part is that you called me an asshole,

I actually did no such thing, of course. But if I misunderstood where you were coming from, and you were only making the point that people who engage in risky behaviors and catch AIDS bear some responsibility for their choices - then that is something I have never disagreed with, from the beginning.

I've done that

[voraciousreader]

First, yes, you didn't call me an asshole, I didn't look at who I was replying to, so I apoligize.

Second, I think the statement I made previously, with the quotations around it followed by "that's the point" makes it as clear as is needed.

Last, this bores me and I'm done, I had a desire to discuss a particular point yet was still dragged into the "yeah but that's not the point of the thread" tripe, so my wllingness to continue is depleted.

Re:FIST SPORT

[dotancohen]

+5 Balls

Wouldn't that make walking a tad awkward?

I'd be nothing after what the Niggers do to him when they read his post.

I'm not racist (I hate everybody equally), but those who call themselves Niggers tend to be the violent type. And this guy needs someone to perform some violence on him.

Remember, it was called GRIDS for a reason.

[Anonymous Coward]

A mere rearrangement of the colors of the 'rainbow fruit(redundant?) logo' to the "standard format" is trivial, considering the orientation of the vast majority of users of said computers (usually rotund goatee sporting graphic arts types who use their obesity as a canary for AIDS related weight loss)

Originally it was called GRIDS (Gay Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome), but the same gang that terrorized (used violence or threats of violence in violation of criminal statues to achieve change) whose backlight boards did not go "CHOOOOOOOOONNNNG!" upon power-up, the American Psychiatric/Psychological Association into deleting Section 302 from the DSM-II in the early 1970's, engaged in the same tactics and thus the virology establishment grabbed ankles and called it [insert Win95 Robotz Restore sound here] Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. It was an attempt to delink such activity with its proper consequences.

Anal Injected Death Sentence spelled backwards is Stick Dick In Ass.

Pride is the process by which an individual becomes the personification of his/her behavior such that to hate the conduct is to hate the person. "Love me, love my orientation" whose contrapositive implies "Hate my orientation, hate me".

hiv u'r not that old after all

[doub_l_heli]

I can just see it now, a mental picture that's clear as day. Black gay folk with mouth sores in the jungle munching on half cooked monkeys, waiting to take turns on each other. Oh geez! Could you please try a little harder to come up with a realistic theory. Lets throw away years of research in epidemiology and actually listen to this bullshit. AIDS exploded in Africa in recent years because of the continent is prone to the very factors that allow AIDS to thrive - sexual promiscuity brought about by modernization. To be sincere its doubtful that AIDS in Africa begun in the pre-colonial era. Gay sex is not only frowned upon, but it brings such shame that gay people to this day are likely to be lynched by their own families. I still believe that AIDS is the result of the gene tinkering we've been doing. Pre-colonial Africa differs from post-colonial Africa due to the erosion of traditional values (a colonial policy of forcible de-culturation). Removal of positive elements of culture led down a slippery slope to the current state of Africa today. The time frame mentioned in the article is mostly pre-colonial. Promiscuity in cities and villages today is quite rampant. In traditional society fornication and adultery was almost unheard of and there were severe economic and social penalties, and anyway polygamy was perfectly acceptable so unless the partner of every man and woman alive was frolicking with primates in the jungle, AIDS would have died out on its own not headed to the west. So hiv u'r not that old after all.