New HIV Strain Discovered
reporter and barnyjr were among the readers alerting us to the discovery of a new strain of the HIV virus, found in a woman from the west central African nation of Cameroon. "It differs from the three known strains of human immunodeficiency virus and appears to be closely related to a form of simian virus recently discovered in wild gorillas, researchers report in Monday's edition of the journal Nature Medicine. ... The most likely explanation for the new find is gorilla-to-human transmission, Plantier's team said. But... they cannot rule out the possibility that the new strain started in chimpanzees and moved into gorillas and then humans, or moved directly from chimpanzees to both gorillas and humans. ... Researchers said it could be circulating unnoticed in Cameroon or elsewhere. The virus's rapid replication indicates that it is adapted to human cells, the researchers reported."
Somewhere, someone was either very desperate, brave, stupid or all of the above to be getting busy with a gorilla.
The most likely explanation for the new find is gorilla-to-human transmission
So you'll be able to spot those at greatest risk by the way they are walking?
Who screwed the gorilla?
How would HIV be transmitted from a gorilla to humans?
It is believed that HIV jumped to humans eating gorilla meat. Note to self, no more gorilla burgers.
I'm HIV positive that I won't have to worry about this, I don't know anybody into animals not even furries.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
wait? what? real.... science... news?
A man and his wife are at the zoo, when the man notices a large male gorilla leering at his wife. The man tells his wife, look, that gorilla is really hot for you, show him some skin. Just joking, the wife flashes the gorilla, and it makes the beast bang on the cage, jump up and down and bellow. Just then, the man opens the door to his cage, throws the wife in, and says "now, tell him you have a headache".
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Is when some new strain of HIV becomes more easily transmittable.
Europeans didn't do it
While i agree that the UK and FR have had a major detrimental impact on the african subcontinent...
Have you seen the news about GAP and Levis in Africa lately? and lets not forget that American pharmaceutical companies refuse to make their drugs available in generic form to stop the transmission of aids to unborn babies.
So get off your high horse.
This is actually the first time I have seen someone argue that the FAILURE of colonial powers to eradicate native religions in favour of christianity makes us by extension partly responsible, through historic linkages, for gangrapes. Force religion on people and you're responsible for how they turn out; fail to force religion on people and you're responsible for how they turn out.
Personally, I would rather argue that Africans have a responsibility to cure themselves of their superstitions, and that if they are unhappy with their country borders, to resolve that unhappiness. Europeans succeeded in doing it, many years before the Africans failed to.
Interestingly, even countries that were never colonised and didn't see a single settler are as crappy as the others. What does that say for your causal responsibility chain?
1. The index patient is from Cameroon, but was living in France at the time of discovery.
2. The patient did not eat gorilla meat personally, by her testimony, and it is likely the mode of transmission to her was from an as yet unidentified male human. She is probably several transmissions removed from the person we would designate the true patient Zero, and that hypothetical person probably is (or was) in Cameroon, and was initially exposed in Cameroon.
3. the patient does not have AIDS symptoms at this time. Best guess is this strain will produce loss of immune function with time if untreated, and will probably respond to the same treatments as the more established strains.
4. This strain could be slower or quicker to go to symptomatic state, not react to some drugs the same, or otherwise vary, but there's no particular reason to expect any super plague or drug resistant strain.
Who is John Cabal?
"Please do not feed, or exchange bodily fluids with the monkeys"
Now that should do it..
There was a show describing natural immunity to HIV. In fact, one of the interesting discussions was how the prostitutes in Africa had actually developed immunity to the virus.
The article does not seem to mention the impact of the virus on existing treatments. Is the new virus a hiv version of MDR-TB?
the woman was 62 when she was diagnosed in 2004
meaning, this could be an old strain of aids. by "old" i mean it could have been in the human population for a long time
i hypothesize this simply because the woman is still alive (assuming she wasn't infected 2 years ago) and mild disease is a sign of an "old" disease
the fate of all diseases and all parasites is equilibrium with its hosts. it does no good to kill off your host so quickly there's no retransmission. so after an initial sickle swinging period of mass slaughter, the strains of any disease that dominate will be those who tend to be more mild, simply because by killing less faster, they spread wider and therefore survive longer
so most likely its not the stand or 28 days later we're talking here
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
As in Human immunodeficiency virus virus?
This legacy means that ancient tribal beliefs and superstitions are still prevalent because it was easier to pacify the natives with animism than with modern religion.
First, there is a certain amount of "modern" (ie European) religion in Africa, enough for people to get concerned when the pope gives bad sex advice.
Second, what benefits would a wider introduction of European religion have? Religions usually seem to build their values around the concerns of the time and place where they form so it's likely that say European Christianity would be a bad fit in Africa.
The opportunity to bring Africa into the modern age was thrown away and now we are faced with a backwards, superstitious continent without education, reason, law and order.
Treating Africa as a single entity makes it difficult to have any meaningful discussion here. Africa has a large number of countries and there are tribal groups within some of those countries. These countries range from relatively healthy economies with legal systems and education through to war torn or poverty stricken non-functional states. Beliefs and religions obviously vary as well. Could you be more specific about which parts of Africa you are referring to?
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
and there is always being bitten as you try to mount gorilla :D
in the case of malaria, it is the host itself which evolves mitigating factors, such as the sickle cell gene, which has evolved 3 different times in 3 different variations in africa, the mediterranean and southeast asia
but yes, with diseases that are not directly transmitted between hosts of the same species, there is no need to dampen fatality. but then the interspecies mode of transmission is a form of dampening in and of itself
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And it's still no concern for /. readers.
Great, someone shared their dirty heroin needle with a gorilla... Come on people!
Why is anyone surprised?
If you swing tree and Buck Monkey , you get bad disease Buddy
It's always the africans.
That's not true, SARS was the Chinese.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
It's always the africans.
That's not true, SARS was the Chinese.
And reality television was the Americans.
It somehow seems relevant to be able to tell people which animal they should try to avoid. Chimpanzees ? Gorilla's ? Other types of monkeys or perhaps an entirely different animal ?
> one day they will mutate into a super aids that is airborne
Will give swine flu a whole new meaning...
Actually, I believe the first successful reality TV shows were European shows that were imitated by American TV(Survivor).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I, for one, welcome our new primate dominatrices.
Wasn't the first Big Brother show Dutch?
Parent post expresses a very, very unusual point of view. It's almost saying, "colonization, done right, is a good thing; the problem was that Europeans did it wrong." It's very Rudyard-Kipling, "white man's burden"-esque.
do you have any idea how strong a chimpanzee or a gorilla is? we're not talking about a placid herbivore here, we're talking 100+ pounds of pure muscle, sinew and razor sharp canines. this is not an environment in which any bestiality can possibly occur. i think sex with a shark would be easier, seriously
the whole aids-was-from-sex-with-a-monkey line of thought is pure high school sophomore stupidity. way more 4chan than actual plausible science
bushmeat is what it is: a messy stew of tropical disease waiting to happen, tons of transmission avenues, from open sores on the skin and in the mouth, to the sheer bloodiness of butchery. no one ever said SARS was from sex with a civet cat, or swine flu was from sex with a pig. i really don't think in the entire history of humanity anyone has ever had sex with a living chimpanzee or gorilla just because of the physical impossibility of it all
oh great, now i just launched necrophilic bestiality meme for aids origin
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And no, I can't claim credit for the name. That belongs to a friend of mine named Dov who resides in Las Vegas, and is a very large Jewish man. The poem it goes with is brilliant.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
The V already stands for virus, ranking 'HIV Virus' up there with 'PIN Number' and 'ATM Machine'. I would hope that a tech site like Slashdot, used to dealing with acronyms, would do better.
Necrobestialsodomopedogopoly
there fixed for your friend
you can't push hot button sex topics without pushing the pedophilia button, come on!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That or it was from a country where the most you'll see of your bride before you've bought it, or of anyone else's wife at all, is akin to a gant cloth dildo with a small netted slit at eye level. So, you know, you could pay four camels to Abdul for his daughter, and maybe she'll be as ugly as the last one when you take the burqa off, or you could get a gorilla for free and you know what you're getting ;)
And if you keep it clothed, nobody would probably even notice. I mean, I can just see it:
Achmed: "Say, Hassan, did your wives just go 'ook, ook'?"
Hassan: "Erm, they're foreign. Haven't learned the language yet."
Achmed: "And by Allah, look at that one. She's broader shouldered than the two of us together."
Hassan: "Yeah, I bought me big wife so she can bear me lots of children. Ha ha."
Achmed: "If you say so..."
Come to think of it, it would make a good marketing slogan: Burqas, helping ugly chicks get laid wherever alcohol is forbidden ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Simian Immune Deficiency Virus was thought to be inert in chimps. It was speculated they evolved past it long ago. But now its been discovered it slowly kills chimps much like AIDS does to humans. SIV may be a predecessor of the human virus.
If this strain does not cause problems with humans (which is unproven so far) can it be used as a basis for a vaccine.
While I agree that transmission was almost certainly not sexual, and very much agree that gorillas(as with most of the larger non-human primates) are not to be trifled with, I'm not sure your conclusion follows.
A dolphin could drown the best human swimmer with only modest effort; but swimming and interacting with them is pretty safe because they are (mostly) friendly social animals. Pissing them off would be a bad plan; but getting along with them isn't too hard. In a similar vein, trying to rape a gorilla would be a bad idea, it'd almost certainly maul and/or kill you. However, gorillas are fairly intelligent, moderately human-like, and have well developed social signaling mechanisms. Nothing prevents, in principle, someone from securing the gorilla's cooperation.
I don't know about humans raping gorillas, but I've seen an account from a gorilla researcher of a gorilla raping a human (the gorilla was killed later, but had to be allowed to do its thing at the time as they lacked any way to stop it without risking that it would just rip its victim's head off or something).
Read about it here
http://www.thePandemic.com sad stuff.
The only comment that comes to mind is
effing a...
the fate of all diseases and all parasites is equilibrium with its hosts. it does no good to kill off your host so quickly there's no retransmission. so after an initial sickle swinging period of mass slaughter, the strains of any disease that dominate will be those who tend to be more mild, simply because by killing less faster, they spread wider and therefore survive longer
so most likely its not the stand or 28 days later we're talking here
Au, contraire. By definition, HIV, as a retrovirus, says you are wrong about that; lemme guess, you can't get pregnant the first time, either?
There is nothing to FEAR but NOTHING itself; and I fear there is a whole lot of nothing going on. --scorpivs
CowboyNeal, with a dozen roses and a little champagne.
What makes you so sure it was a dude?
"A group of prostitutes thought to be immune to HIV have now become infected, causing dismay to scientists hoping to develop an Aids vaccine.
It was thought that exposure to HIV on a regular basis created immunity, but six Kenyan women previously thought to be resistant are now HIV-positive. "
From BBC News
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
Well, at least in this segment of the population.
If you're reading this, you have nothing to worry about.
Smile.
I see. So you're the appointed joke police and platinum standard of what every human on the planet should find funny, right? I mean, it can't possibly be that someone else has different tastes in jokes that you do, right? ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
instantly reminded of a certain Ricky Gervais bit?
Obligatory (stupid) comic strip reference http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1592
Wow, don't use science or anything, that surprises me. Infected bush meat to rotting gums or fresh knife wounds received while butchering is the most plausible method of zoonosis. The latter moreso than the former as saliva is a great disinfectant.
No sex == No AIDS!!!
The French, once again, demonstrates their leadership in the politics of inclusion by admitting this woman whose body represents a veritable cornucopia of diverse ecological foment.
Seastead this.
I'm still looking forward to an airborne variation of rabies so I can test out my zombie survival kit.
I think it's high time we soaked that entire continent in napalm. KILL AIDS WITH FIRE!
Why do people have to constantly fsck with the money?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Nothing prevents, in principle, someone from securing the gorilla's cooperation.
Rule 34? http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Rule%2034
He has RAS Syndrome!
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Are you kidding? Dolphins are massive jerks.
They only put up with humans because they realize we could convert them to canned tuna in two months, flat.
Nah dawg... I'm just gonna chill with mah monkey.
.. or more accurately, Chinese ducks
I am soooo horny, I guess I could do it with a gorilla.....is this the type of thought a woman in africa has,
man....I got to go over there....have me some horny babes......then again....maybe not....
I might have a hard time finding some condoms!!!