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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?
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.
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.
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?
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 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
I almost used my mod points to mod you redundant (couldn't help myself), but then realized at that point it would instead be funny, so then I caught in a logical conundrum and decided to comment instead.
Great, someone shared their dirty heroin needle with a gorilla... Come on people!
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 somehow seems relevant to be able to tell people which animal they should try to avoid. Chimpanzees ? Gorilla's ? Other types of monkeys or perhaps an entirely different animal ?
Dude, in some southern African countries the adult prevalence hits 20% The animal to avoid on that content appears to be: humans.
"Oh no... he found the
I wouldn't really say this requires any extra attention, it should just be good practice on a whole to try and limit/reduce exposure to direct forms of blood/fluid transfers when dealing with any animal.
We probably shouldn't hunt or eat primates at all though really. But any animal is a potential risk for infections. HIV might be the scariest, but there are others that are just as deadly.
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
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.
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.