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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."
i was across the river back in 1997. Ironically one of the soldiers i was with said that if he was going to get AIDS, he wanted to get it right there at the source
I'm glad that all the deniers have moved on to climate change, and the aids denial has pretty much died down.
Perhaps Kinshasa is the place where the disease got a foothold in the human population, but unless people were having sex with chimps, I would be more inclined to consider a far more compelling origin story.
The modern polio vaccine was grown on simian livers indiscriminate of any other pathogenic bodies which were present. Some of the doctors at the time were abject in their concerns over the limitations and dangers present in those early methods.
Read Dr. Mary's Monkey for the details. -It's a story which includes some notorious figures from the last century, including both the CIA and none other than Lee Harvey Oswald, to name a few. But don't let the "the hell?" factor dissuade you. Truth is nearly always stranger than fiction.
For those unwilling to read a book, (which is going to be nearly everybody given our the nature of our internet-speed attention spans today), here is an interview with the author which covers the bases fairly well:
Interview with Edward T. Haslam
Hang on.
We were always told that Africans shagged monkeys and that's how the virus eventually mutated and went across.
Now it's mishandling of bushmeat?!
Now there's something you don't hear every day.
... for all you have given civilization. AIDS, Ebola, savagery, Obama...
But you did give us Bob Marley, so what say we call it even and you GET THE FUCK OUT OF TEH COUNTRY!
Regards,
- White People
HIV made a cross-species jump in the 1920s, and went on to kill millions.
But Ebola couldn't possibly mutate enough to survive slightly longer when exposed to air.
I feel much safer now.
So there was no monkey business with... ehm... chimps that led to the species jump?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Or as we call it outside Africa: Monkey Sex.
Did they eat chimps for food?
Or worse.... wait that's unthinkable!
Think that'll sell as a welcome banner?
some dirty human fucked a chimpanzee
Which is why i avoid most of them. People say it is because i am narcissistic. That may be true, but i bet there is a simpler explanation. I am glad that we have made some progress in combating this disease and as a person that wants to preserve our culture, I'm a big fan of not encouraging people in psychopathic behavior. How fucking stupid do you have to be to get aids? How fucking sick do you have to be to give someone aids? Call me a homophobe if you want, because the truth is i AM very afraid of the kind of sick bastard that thinks it is his right to exterminate people by the thousands for his own self serving weirdness.
yeah whatever... aids was made in a lab...
More shit traceable to porch monkeys.
Kinshasa Zoo had a female chimpanzee that went into heat and was causing all kinds of problems. The veterinarian concluded that she needed to have sex or she would stay in heat. But she was also indicating that she really wanted it with Jim, the guy who cleaned her cage.
So the zoo keeper suggested to the vet that maybe Jim could take care of her. "Do you think he'd do it with a chimpanzee?" asked the vet
"Well, maybe he'd do it for $200" suggested the keeper, "Let's ask him."
They found Jim and explained the problem. Jim agreed, but with three conditions:
"First, I'm not going to kiss her". The vet assured him that wasn't a problem, she wouldn't want to kiss
"Second, if she gets pregnant I'm not responsible". Again the vet assured him that wouldn't happen.
"For $200, right?". "Yes" said the keeper, "but what's the third condition?"
"Okay, I'll do it. But Third - I can't give her the $200 until next payday"
The list of cities was Philadelphia, San Francisco, New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Kinshasa, Karachi, Bangkock, Beijing.
Have gnu, will travel.
"which probably made the species-jump through contact with infected blood while handling bush meat"
There is of course another, rather unholy, possibility for the cross-species jump.
1920 was not that long ago - less than 100 years. Are there any eye witnesses who can report encountering someone who died of a mysterious wasting disease?
I'm not Catholic; I disagree with many things they believe, but this posting of yours was extremely dishonest. This is the sort of extreme dishonest Catholic-bashing that activists in groups like ActUp used to use while invading their churches with protest banners and baskets full of condoms.
NOBODY on the so-called "religious right" who was of ANY note ever claimed AIDS only affected homosexuals or that "condoms cause AIDS". What you have donw is what propagandists ALWAYS do: take a set of beliefs or statements completely out of context, stripping away all related words that made them valid and then present them in an isolated way that makes them seem completely insane. This is like some critic of Al Gore watching him saying CO2 causes global warming in one context, and at another time saying global warming causes species to die-off, and at another time and context saying that species dying is a normal part of evolution, and then running to the internet to type "Al Gore says that when Angel Merkel speaks she is causing the people of Brazil to mutate into space aliens!"
What some people on the so-called "religious right" and some Catholics said that you were twisting were the following things (and even I am being too imprecise here but I do not feel like writing a novel in this posting):
1. Sexual relations outside of traditional marriage place you at higher risk of sexual diseases. This is a fact even the CDC and NIH agree with, not out of bigotry but simple statistics (people who only ever have sex with one partner who is equally faithful are less likely to get and spread ANY sexual disease than people with multiple "parrtners" whether they are in parallel or serial relationships). Oh, and monogamous homosexual relationships are not as safe as monogamous hetero relationships (could be for various cultural reasons, or various biological reasons, or a mix).
2. Homosexual males are more likely than other groups to get and pass sexually-transmitted (of all types, not just HIV/AIDS) diseases. This is a documented fact which the CDC and NIH also agree with and have studied many times. One can attempt to formulate many reasons for this, but its probably sufficient to ascribe this to the idea that people who are "risk takers" and willing to do things "outside the societal norms" are more-likely than others to engage in risker combinations of riskier activities and more frequently than others.
3. Catholics, who have long had a fixation on ALL forms of birth control, have long worried that condoms encourage people to be more willing to engage in sexual activity outside of traditional marriage. There's plenty of evidence for this effect in MANY fields of human activity; when you give people a level of protection to enable them to feel safer doing things they consider risky and would therefore otherwise not do, they recalibrate their risk tolerance and are more willing to do these things. There are some good arguments that SOME people (particularly teenagers with brains that are not yet fully-mature) are going to take the risks anyway and thus the protection saves lives. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle and there's probably no ethical way to actually test these arguments and figure out which option truly saves more lives in the real world rather than on paper
To smash these three things together and say, essentially, "those whacky religious people are so stupid they think condoms cause AIDS and only gays get AIDS" is so insane it is breath-taking; it's an absolute inversion of the truth. Oh, and had the public listened to the Catholics on this subject (and, again, I am NOT Catholic) the AIDS crisis would have burned-out in the US a quarter century ago and no typical young person today in the US would be at risk of AIDS, or indeed many other sexually-transmitted diseases. Instead, in the 80's and 90's we listened to the super-intelligent non-religious "authorites" and now there are AIDS sufferers in every city, we've spent many BILLIONS of dollars fighting the AIDS battles,
on the left. This includes all those who [1] claimed somebody had intentionally engineered AIDS for some nefarious purpose, [2] thought HIV and AIDS were two unrelated things, and [3] thought AIDS was not the reason all those people were dropping dead.
Some were gay activists who insisted that it was a disease engineered to wipe out gays. Some were so-called black activists who were convinced the white man had engineered AIDS to wipe out the black people in Africa so that the African continent could be grabbed for its resources. Some were like all those liberals (Jenny McCarthy ring any bells?) who rant against imagined conspiracies by big drug companies, insisting that the disease was either an accident that escaped a drug company lab OR a scheme to make everybody need new drugs OR a scheme to sell useless drugs to people who were sick with this new disease.
Then, of course, there was the actual Soviet communist propaganda campaign to try to get the world to blame AIDS on the Americans.
There was NO TRUTH to any of the crap the AIDS deniers were pushing, and the AIDS reasearchers and drug companies were not repeatedly caught doctoring and/or hiding data, trying to drive from the field anybody who had other theories, continually demanding that "the science is settled" just before each new data point highlighted another error, or keeping any critics from peer-reviewed papers (they were EAGER to have contrary studies in their peer-reviewed publications where they could properly be openly, honestly and publicly peer-reviewed into the trash bins of history)
so.... no. AIDS denial had NOTHING in common with critics of of climate change hyperbole.
::couhcoughOutbreakcoughcough::
So sorry, a bit Dustin Hoffman in here, setting my throat off.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I've been jealous and I've been angry, but I've never killed anyone. Just because you have a feeling doesn't mean you have to do whatever comes into your head. I've thought "I'd like to fuck her" and "I'd like to punch him in the mouth", and chose to do neither. Reptiles may not have the ability to make such decisions, but mammals do.
I heard that AIDS was a manufactured virus to kill off the african population. I believe it.
who butt-fucked a monkey?
Nothing in that post is wrong, but somebody with hurt feelings down-modded it with no contrary info.
Dr Mary's Monkey, did they?
Luckily there's AIDS to punish those who don't feel the same way.