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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."
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
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.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
"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.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
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!
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?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
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.
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."
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?
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
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.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
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.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!