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AIDS Origin Traced To 1920s Kinshasa
An anonymous reader writes: A new study published in Science (abstract) has traced the origin of HIV/AIDS back to Kinshasa in the 1920s. The authors say Kinshasa, now in the Democratic Republic of Congo, was then undergoing explosive population growth while supporting an abundant sex trade. These factors, combined with the use of unsterilized needles at health clinics and the railways moving a million people in and out of the city each year, conspired to start the pandemic. "HIV is a mutated version of a chimpanzee virus, known as simian immunodeficiency virus, which probably made the species-jump through contact with infected blood while handling bush meat. The virus made the jump on multiple occasions. One event led to HIV-1 subgroup O which affects tens of thousands in Cameroon. Yet only one cross-species jump, HIV-1 subgroup M, went on to infect millions of people across every country in the world."
So, one virus did one thing, so why can't another do something completely different?
Seriously, which species are affected and the mode of transmission are wildly different. There's no useful connection between these two issues.
Like everyone else on slashdot, I didn't read the entire original paper, so I'm speculating, but...
The virus probably did make the jump multiple times before, but it didn't spread because the people involved died quickly (not necessarily due to HIV, but due to the brutal nature of life in those places and times), and never made it into the metropolis that was Kinshasa (Leopoldville). Read 'King Leopold's Ghost' by Adam Hochschild to get an idea of how rough and brutal life was for the Africans in early 20'th Century Zaire/Belgian_Congo.
As for the virus changing from a chimp version to a human version, that probably didn't take much doing. After all, we share perhaps 98 or 99% of the same genes. Initially I'll bet that the virus didn't reproduce very well in humans, but survival of the fittest (of the virus) would allow the strains better suited to survive and reproduce to become the more common strains that we see today.
It's called AIDS denial but it's more technically HIV Denial, they deny that HIV leads to AIDS, and instead say AIDS is caused by Sleeping around / sharing needles etc etc. Foo Fighter front man David Grohl was big on this nonsense for a while back in the early 2000's
Whenever someone says something really flat and sorta elliptical like "orally," we gotta get clear about this too -- HIV cannot be spread by kissing. It can be spread by oral sex however, and can be spread by mouth-to-mouth contact when other factors are in play.
HIV exposure from dental work is actually a really common risk factor. In fact, the very first known case of iatrogenic HIV infection was from a dental office.
It's generally accepted you can't get it from kissing, but kissing, eating food, eating raw food, eating bodily fluids, oral contact in the presence of bodily fluids, and oral contact associated with cuts or open sores -- for example, florid herpes -- are all really different vectors.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.