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New Study Shows HIV Epidemic Started Spreading In New York In 1970, Clears the Name of 'Patient Zero' (nbcnews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: A new genetic study confirms theories that the global epidemic of HIV and AIDS started in New York around 1970, and it also clears the name of a gay flight attendant long vilified as being "Patient Zero." Researchers got hold of frozen samples of blood taken from patients years before the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS was ever recognized, and teased out genetic material from the virus from that blood. They use it to show that HIV was circulating widely during the 1970s, and certainly before people began noticing a "gay plague" in New York in the early 1980s. "We can date the jump into the U.S. in about 1970 and 1971," Michael Worobey, an expert on the evolution of viruses at the University of Arizona, told reporters in a telephone briefing. Their findings also suggest HIV moved from New York to San Francisco in about 1976, they report in the journal Nature. Their findings confirm widespread theories that HIV first leapt from apes to humans in Africa around the beginning of the 20th century and circulated in central Africa before hitting the Caribbean in the 1960s. The genetic evidence supports the theory that the virus came from the Caribbean, perhaps Haiti, to New York in 1970. From there it spread explosively before being exported to Europe, Australia and Asia. The Worobey team also sequenced samples of virus taken from Gaetan Dugas, a Canadian flight attendant named as "Patient Zero." Dugas died in 1984 and stunned researchers when he told them he'd had about 250 sexual partners a year between 1979 and 1981, although it later became clear that was not uncommon. The sequences make it clear he was a victim of an epidemic that had already been raging, and not its originator, Worobey said. "It's shocking how this man's name has been sullied and destroyed by this incorrect history," said Peter Staley, a former Wall Street bond trader who became an AIDS activist in New York in the 1980s. "He was not Patient Zero and this study confirms it through genetic analysis," Staley told NBC News. "No one should be blamed for the spread of viruses," Worobey said.
At leat I found it interesting
http://www.radiolab.org/story/...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I grew up in San Francisco, and by the mid-70s the "skinny dying gay man" was something we already talked about. When AIDS was named and later discovered to be HIV we knew then what that "skinny dying gay man" syndrome was all about.
When many years later Patient 0 was identified with infection starting in the early 1980s I knew right away that they were wrong and that AIDS had reached America at least ten years earlier.
This article shows that. I've always been very surprised that not a single doctor who dealt with AIDS patients before 1980 (and now we know there were hundreds of them) stepped up and called out the timeline as being utterly wrong.
Radiolab did an episode about Patient Zero http://www.radiolab.org/story/...
Bullshit. Your responsibility is to self-quarantine until you are sure that you aren't infectious. Otherwise, you're culpable for the people you infect. That jerk who comes to work with an active flu and infects the whole place should have to suffer with ten consecutive flus for that.
The only special pass in this case is that the HIV infected people of the 1970s and 80s had no idea they were sick.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
So...No Libel Suit
That is some really great detective work, going back all the way to the start of the last century.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"'No one should be blamed for the spread of viruses,' Worobey said."
In related news, Worobey has been giving his partners herpes.
Relax, dude. He was only talking about people doing it unawares.
AC appears to have vCJD. That would explain a lot of his posts.
How is this guy somehow vindicated by not being the first carrier? He still did every single irresponsible act he did when we believed he was the first. I would say this actually makes him look worse because due to the revision of the timeline there's a bigger chance that he might have heard about some mysterious new illness and should have been more careful. I mean, it's not like STDs were unheard of before the 80s
According to TFA, apes in Africa conspired to spread it to humans around the beginning of the 20th century.
According to this article, the family of viruses HIV belongs to have been infecting primates for millions of years. As to HIV-1 and HIV-2, it has this to say about probable origins:
So what we likely have is a couple of events, unlikely in and of themselves, but where there is enough interspecies contact, as keeping infected pets or eating infected bushmeat, that the these two related viruses managed to cross-infect. After that, the viruses would have quickly have evolved to their new hosts (which really are pretty damned closely related to the old hosts).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
But, but... it was invented by the CIA! Everyone knows that.
Any theories as to why Slashdot attracts so many garbage people? And to be clear, by "garbage people", I mean seriously shitty, messed-up human beings.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Didn't you just contradict yourself? I agree that, say, coming to work when you know that you have the flu because your boss expects it is a voluntary act (ignoring for a moment the motivation behind it, which, IMO, is coerced) because you KNOW that you have an infectious disease. When you have no idea that you are carrying/passing a virus because the government willfully ignored the evidence for many years therefore exacerbating said situation, well.....
What where the best and brightest US pathologists and epidemiologists doing for a decade?
With all the science grants and funding for cancer and the chemical/bio weapons treaty funding mix changes, what happened to basic public health reporting in the USA?
Did no doctor not report strange new issues? Did no pathologists not have the feeling a book chapter might be before them or funding to chase?
Did no public health official or health bureaucrats not have some map or database of interesting cases that got reported and think to follow up?
Was public health funding so cut back in 1970-1980 to risk public health? Was cancer the only issue getting extra US funding thanks to lobbyists and the party connected?
Where was the academic curiosity? Autopsies, slides? Rare conditions not often seen? What was it about the Vietnam war decade and a few years later that ensured US academics missed a really basic and interesting public health issue?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
OK, but he was making an overly general statement. People are so inconsiderate already in this world, it doesn't need to get worse.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I made an exception to a general principle.
The general principle is that you're an awful human being if you infect other people with a disease because it's inconvenient for you to call out of work or to change your travel plans. People do it all the time and they deserve to hear that.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
It's not suddenly, in 1979, tens of millions of gay men suddenly started showing signs of immunological deficiency. Because HIV infections take some time to develop into full blown AIDS (and that can be highly dependent on the individual), it would have taken a long time before there would be confirmation that there was something infecting gay men. And once you've established that there is some sort of sexually transmitted disease that leads to AIDS, you now have to literally pour through all sorts of tissue samples, blood samples, lymphatic samples, and so on and so on looking for the needle in the haystack. You'll probably end up going down a few false roads because many of these individuals probably had other STD infections, so you have to also be thinking "could this be some sort of mutated syphilis or hepatitis infection?"
It is largely because of diseases like AIDS and the technology developed to isolate infectious agents that we are so much better today than we were thirty or forty years ago. To judge the medical community of the early 1980s by the standards of the 21st century is absurd.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The only special pass in this case is that the HIV infected people of the 1970s and 80s had no idea they were sick.
And a huge number of people carrying a huge number of sexually transmitted diseases today.
Chlamydia often presents with no symptoms in women (https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtreatments/chlamydia).
Herpes is contagious through frequent viral shedding (about 20% of the time) even if the carrier has never noticed any kind of outbreak (http://justherpes.com/facts/herpes-viral-shedding/).
Hepatitis of all forms may not have any concerning symptoms until the disease has progressed (http://www.healthline.com/health/hepatitis-c/symptoms)
HIV can lie mostly dormant for years and still be transmissible (https://www.aids.gov/hiv-aids-basics/just-diagnosed-with-hiv-aids/hiv-in-your-body/stages-of-hiv/)
Primary syphilis presents as a painless ulcer like red spot that disappears after a few days. It's entirely likely to go unnoticed or be passed off as a skin irritation (http://www.cdc.gov/std/syphilis/stdfact-syphilis.htm)
HPV can cause changes in skin tissue without ever causing a traditional "wart" or even a noticeable difference, yet HPV is being blamed for a large number of anal and genital cancers (https://www.dermnetnz.org/topics/anogenital-warts)
If people had any idea they were sick we could probably have stopped the STD epidemic years ago. The reality is that a lot of people don't know they are sick. Those at the highest risk (many sexual partners, injecting drug use, etc) often understate the risk. Testing is reasonably good at catching the serious diseases like HIV, Syphilis and Hepatitis. The tests are even sensitive enough now to detect the disease a week or two after the primary infection.
There was an outbreak of a rare HIV strain in Australia recently that baffled doctors for a while. The patients tested negative to HIV but still had HIV-like symptoms. It was later discovered that they had the strain so rare that nobody tests for it unless it is suspected the patient has it. I can't find a reference to the article I read about it.
So what does APK suffer from?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Anyone having 750 sexual partners over 3 years is a walking petri dish for all sorts of venereal diseases. It's no surprise that AIDS took hold in the gay community if it's true that that level of promiscuity was commonplace.
In the 1970's San Francisco had a male population of 345,680 (http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty70.htm) of whom 6.2% were gay (http://time.com/3752220/lgbt-san-francisco/). That works out to a male gay population of 21432 people.
According to the CDC, the transmission rate for AIDS is about 1.4% per exposure. (http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/risk/estimates/riskbehaviors.html). Patient 0 acknowledged having 750 partners. I would imagine he had intercourse with each partner a few times (guesstimating 3 times each). The results in 750 * 3 = 2250 exposures. With a transmission rate of 1.4%, he caused an additional 31 new AIDS cases over those 3 years. Since the article itself stated that this level of sexual activity was commonplace, it's easy to see how this horrible epidemic exploded in such a short time. If you have a couple thousand very promiscuous people, and each one of those thousands of people go on to infect 31 others over a few years, it's easy to see why this happened in the way that it did.
Over the course of human existence, I suspect this pattern of behavior has been the cause of numerous epidemics. In olden times, people did not understand why new diseases emerge, but on occasion, they did correlate disease with excessive promiscuity. Thus various taboos have been established as societies sought to protect themselves. Over time, memories fade and we forget the original reason for a particular taboo, but I bet at least some taboos have a very good reason for existing.
According to what?
"... the global epidemic of HIV and AIDS started in New York around 1970"
This sentence is copied from the article, but on further reading you see that it is the USA epidemic, not the global epidemic, which is being talked about.
Compare the opening sentence of this article, "Scientists have managed to reconstruct the route by which HIV/Aids arrived in the US – exonerating once and for all the man long blamed for the ensuing pandemic in the west."
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Any theories as to why Slashdot attracts so many garbage people? And to be clear, by "garbage people", I mean seriously shitty, messed-up human beings.
You misspelled "troll" but I'll float a theory as to why they're attracted to Slashdot: (1) anonymity; (2) minimal consequences for posting offensive material, especially as AC; and (3) an easily-provoked audience whose responses feed their egos.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Because there are people like yourself who give them the attention they want?
Why didn't AIDS become as big in the hetero community -- or did it, and the media has never reported it that way? I know its a problem in Africa, but I'm most interested in the US.
Female-to-male spread harder? Lower frequency sex in heteros? Lower sex partner churn in heteros?
I came of age in the 1980s when AIDS was a big deal and frankly, almost never was it something I found my female partners to be concerned with. They worried about pregnancy, although even that was often not taken too seriously.
I thought he made everyone else suffer?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Not everyone is on average so healthy and would get that easy 10 years. So some early cases should have presented given the average spread of the wider population. Poverty, work conditions, poor nutrition could all play a part not having above average health.
Re "and so on and so on looking for the needle in the haystack." thats the idea of having great public health experts.
Any local Dr can work with what they see all day everyday.
The curiosity and follow up is what sets the really smart experts apart from the average. So what was holding them back from doing their jobs and reporting?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It's not suddenly, in 1979, tens of millions of gay men suddenly started showing signs of immunological deficiency.
Tens of millions? I don't think so. Surely you mean thousands.
"According to scientific records, African chimpanzees were used in the manufacture of the HB vaccines during the early 1970s. Additional documents prove that human HB viruses cultured in vivo in chimpanzees were returned to humans whose infected blood serum was then pooled to develop four different strains of experimental HB vaccine pilot tested between 1970 and 1975 in New York City and central Africa. " http://www.originofaids.com/ar...
Bullshit. Your responsibility is to self-quarantine until you are sure that you aren't infectious. Otherwise, you're culpable for the people you infect. That jerk who comes to work with an active flu and infects the whole place should have to suffer with ten consecutive flus for that.
Except you are spreading the infection well before you show symptoms, and everyone at the office has probably already been exposed (whether they use that useless hand lotion or not.) So basically, learn about how viruses spread before hunting for witches.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
What where the best and brightest US pathologists and epidemiologists doing for a decade?
Oh it was a weird time. There was so much politics around AIDS research, that it took forever for people to even accept the facts. Do you remember the HIV deniers? The people who insisted that HIV does not lead to AIDS, and that there was another cause? Congress was reluctant to spend any money on research, since they didn't want to be called out as helping gays. Researchers had to worry about how they presented their studies for fear of losing funding if they phrased things incorrectly.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
"If people had any idea they were sick we could probably have stopped the STD epidemic years ago."
It's like STDs have evolved to spread without causing obvious symptoms that prevent the carrier from getting laid and spreading them or something.
Except antivax retards
They guy may not have truly been "patient zero" but if he didn't fuck 1000 people from all over the world, it sure would have spread a lot slower. Not making any kind of moral observation here, just weird every news story I read talks about him being somehow "vindicated."
Re 'Oh it was a weird time."
Thats what I am trying to get someone with some 1970's insider medical knowledge to expand on. Was it a lack of reporting? Test got no funding so nobody could request more lab work? Was it an issue with autopsy skill, lack of funding for more tests or lack of any clear heath related autopsy reporting policy? What where the top teaching hospitals doing and their experts who should have been open to something new. New things make great book chapters and ensure more funding.
Was any testing and academic ability blocked due to funding or policy? Have US public health professionals actually learned as institutions from such restrictive policy issues?
Or has bureaucracy and politics made US public health research even more weird internally?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
He's not the patient, he's the disease.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
> "No one should be blamed for the spread of viruses," Worobey said.
I blame the guys with 250 sexual partners per year.
inb4 homophobia, same would apply to heteros.
Fight Frist Psoting!
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There's a new category in the modern age as well; those who contract a virus for which there is a vaccination but were not vaccinated because their parents thought it was better not to. They are blameless (because, parents) but could inadvertently cause serious issues in those that could not be vaccinated for medical reasons.
I am not a medical person, but why does this seem like someone is trying to shove an unverifiable theory down our throats, and have us just accept it as a fact?
Why the study? Why Now? For what purpose? To dispel what? Who really was motivated to do this?
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Canada.
Mostly random stuff.
Gay people worldwide was going crazy in the 80s. They would go to work with their nightclub clothing in a bag, so when they finished work they would head straight for the nightclub. I remember a well-known doctor telling somebody who had syphilis not to worry about having sex with him because he could cure the both of them. Sex become an addiction for gay people and not a pleasure. You had Japanese, elderly businessmen going to Thailand to sleep with anything that was 16 years old or younger. You had the U.S. and the Europeans going crazy using the term "cruising" public toilets, recreation grounds, train stations subways. Shower houses blacked out darkrooms. You had people turning up on a regular basis for treatment for venereal disease it got so bad that they would have to drink a thick slime that was antibiotics, because normal antibiotic treatment was not working on them any more.
Local Council authorities had to close down public toilets. Shopping centres, shopping malls had to put cameras on the outside of the public toilets for security to force gay people out of the toilets who were using them for sex. they were dropping like flies in the 90s.
I was very young back then and I was very! judgemental I didn't like their lifestyle their attitude.. they would want to infect people because " gay people infected them." They had a disliking for each other.
Nowadays even though the rate of infection is going up again you are not allowed to mention what groups in society the infection rate is increasing in.
People are now dying because of political quangos. Ironically quango pressure groups are also self-destructive.
Because that is _much_ less likely?
Because the majority of people that actually say that is the vector are openly racist and try to paint Africans as regularly having sex with monkeys (often in combination with claims that Africans are monkeys)? Because hunting primates as meat is an important food source in some places and hunters tend to get minor wounds where contact of infected primate blood while field dressing the animal could easily spread the infection? Because bestiality isn't an important part of life (done daily) and is less likely to transfer an infection in the first place?
But you can continue to fantasize about fucking primates if you want...
"...And the Band Played On." which goes into that.
Best Slashdot Co
Deniers are still around and even in positions of power (South Africa...). My "favorite" claimed cause of AIDS was a quacking idiot that claimed it resulted from petroleum jelly used as lubricant...
The claim was not that he created the virus. It was that the virus survived in one or two hosts for years, until it got to someone who had sex with thousands to tens of thousands of unprotected sexual partners.
People absolutely should be blamed for spreading viruses when they purposely do so, or when they do so through massive negligence.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
It was well before modern information technology. It is much easier to share large datasets today. Back then it would've involved sifting through paper. Now we can run everything through a statistical model to look for correlations that would not be mentally accessible to a human otherwise. We can do analysis in minutes that some poor bastard would've had to graph out back then. Hell, I'm only in my mid 30s and the stuff we can do now versus even when I was in college is a huge difference in scale and complexity.
Even straight men and women are "sluts". It's just improper to talk about in the US but it doesn't mean it isn't happening.
People that don't dwell in basements have sex, lots of sex with lots of people and although a longer term relationship usually constrains that somewhat, it's not unheard of that people still seek out other mates or even consent to their partners having other partners.
If it were only gay people that were sluts, STDs would've not only just been contained in that community but most STDs would never have the chance to spread, there are just not enough gay people to sustain an epidemic.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Lincoln was an atheist, so if by chance there is a heaven, Lincoln isn't in it.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Influenza outbreak modelling generally assumes that about 1/3 of transmission is from asymptomatic or presymptomatic carriers. Virus shedding starts around a day before symptoms appear, even in the symptomatic. There are estimates that 75% of common cold infections are asymptomatic.
Not all "deniers" were crackpots, at least back then.
And in all fairness, some of the science that led to the discovery of HIV was a bit dodgy, in terms of how it was executed and reported (not, in hindsight, with regard to its contents). Also, the proposed mechanisms of how HIV works were rather novel for the time, so it is not hard to see why some more conservative members of the science community might have been on the fence for a while about whether this was indeed the cause of AIDS. Add to this that even someone like Kary Mullis, who got his Nobel Prize for PCR, a fairly pivotal molecular biology technology, were skeptical, at least for a time.
Of course, nowadays, we know enormously more about the molecular mechanics of HIV and AIDS than we did back then. So by contemporary standards, even the "deniers" from back then who tried to be skeptical on actual scientific grounds look like idiots. And some of them likely were - but not all of them. Not judging from the perspective of the time they were living in.
The majority of sexually active people in America have HPV- and what's more, it can be transmitted even with a condom in use.
Most people don't show symptoms, at least not early on, but it could be responsible for all sorts of cancers. I'm glad HPV vaccines are now in use for the kids... too late for our generation.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Like you, I am proud of NBC. Good for them, I'm glad a major network is promoting empathy and understanding!
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Medicine isn't nearly so scientific as you probably think. An average doctor might see a weird case once or twice that was actually AIDS but that's hard to separate from all the other weird cases they see on a daily basis (House: maybe it's lupus!). In the 70s there certainly weren't any good central databases for general medical records, and there still aren't, especially in the US, because of privacy and insurance concerns.
If you were a doctor in the 70s and you saw a malnourished person waste away and die, would you think "gee, it's horrible we let people starve on the street in America" or "OMG, this is the start of a plague that will sweep the world in twenty years"?
In the early 80s, when the number of patients increased, doctors, especially those who worked in gay communities, who were most at risk, DID notice unusual numbers of people dying and did report and track it.
1970s medical technology wasn't anything like what we've got now. Identifying and isolating a new virus is still a tricky undertaking. In the 1970s it was much more so. A Nobel prize was awarded for the discovery of HIV and its link to AIDS.
It's interesting and sad that we live in the time of absolute paralyzing fear of being politically incorrect
We can no longer refer to anyone as having just "AIDS", it has to be HIV, the virus that causes AIDS...
It's never been "you have paramyxovirus, the virus that causes mumps", it's just "mumps", end of discussion
Steady on chaps, dont utter the incatation that summons him!
That jerk who comes to work with an active flu and infects the whole place should have to suffer with ten consecutive flus for that.
I don't know about you, but I only get 5 sick days a year. Those have to cover not only myself, but I might also have to use them if my wife is too sick to take care of the kids, or the kids are sick but my wife has to work. So if I'm sick and I can work from home I will, but if that's not possible, I'll drag myself to the office unless I'm physically incapable of doing so rather than use a sick day.
To judge the medical community of the early 1980s by the standards of the 21st century is absurd.
But...but.. it's so fun to have illogical hatreds!
Silence is a state of mime.
Classical conditioning. Watch this:
"HOSTS FILE!"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Anyone else now has a craving for chocolate ice cream?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Relax. They have the right to say their bullshit, I have the right to ignore their bullshit. Or even ridicule it as the bullshit that it is.
Free speech is self sealing. If you use free speech to say something idiotic, free speech allows others to show you in no uncertain terms that you're an idiot.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
2/3 of the world not considerate enough to understand it's less burden on the company to keep a sick worker away instead of infecting the rest of the company? That's sad.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's pretty much the problem with new diseases. People don't know they carry them.
People were used to some STDs, and probably they even took care they don't spread them once they noticed they had them. AIDS is vastly different to them. AIDS does not manifest until years after it's too late. Today, there's a test for it. Back then, there was none. Until the 1990s IIRC there was no way to determine whether you have AIDS until your T-Cells were already gone. That happens, as mentioned before, long after the infection, when AIDS fully manifests.
Most sane countries now have laws that consider it assault or even manslaughter if you know you have AIDS and still engage in unprotected sex with someone else and infect them. Anything past that and accusing people who cannot even know they carry the disease is bullshit.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's completely absurd. Abraham Lincoln's belief in God was very evident not only in what he said to the masses but in his personal behavior, especially during his presidency.
For at least the majority of his adult life he would have been more of a Deist than a Protestant. He firmly held on to the idea of a moral God who shaped and gave order to events. His views on Providence and predestination reflect his Calvinist upbringing. It's hard to say exactly what else he believed and when; he was a very private person, and from what hints we do have, his positions on doctrine seem to have been fluid.
I remember this! Interesting... there was an article in "Hustler" (yes, that Hustler) that put forth the theory that petroleum jelly was being absorbed in the system, and causing a breakdown of immune cell production. I think it even said something about "coating" cells or something like that. The Hustler article quoted some professional/scientific hypothesis white paper on how the mechanism could work, etc etc. I also think it went on to talk about how amyl nitrate usage exacerbated the problems, leading to a collapse of the immune system.
AIDS was probably the first instance of a communicable disease that SHOULD have been reportable been exempted for political reasons.
The Gay community resisted all efforts to shut down bath houses which was a major source of infection and they continued (and many still) to practice dangerous sexual activities that have a high potential to spread HIV.
AIDS is a political disease that has been embraced by the SJWs and is even a status symbol in various gay subcultures where they actually try to become infected.
Regardless of what you think of the Gay lifestyle itself, the community has behaved selfishly, irresponsiby, and in some instances criminally.
MERRY FUCKING CHRISTMAS!
Do you realize what would likely happen to someone trying to have sex with a chimpanzee?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The idea that Gaeten Dugas was "patient zero" was thoroughly debunked soon after it initially circulated. The idea of "patient zero" sprang up because of a paper in the early 1980s (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6608269) which implicated Dugas as patient zero. The paper tried to track down AIDS patients' sexual partners, and it included a graph of who had slept with whom. The graph had Gaeten Dugas at the middle of it, connected to all the other AIDS patients through a series of sexual links. Dugas was labelled as node "0", and the others were labelled "1" or "2", etc, depending on how many degrees they were removed from Dugas. (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/74/AIDS_index_case_graph.svg/250px-AIDS_index_case_graph.svg.png).
The paper was mistaken. Although those early AIDS patients were all sexually connected to Dugas by at most a few degrees of separation, that does not imply that they acquired the infection from him. It's known now that HIV has a latency period of more than 8 years in young men before overt illness appears. Most of the early AIDS patients reviewed in that paper had directly or indirectly slept with Dugas only 10.5 months before symptoms started appearing in them, which implies that they had not been infected by him. Those AIDS patients who started getting sick in 1982 probably acquired the infection in the early 1970s, long before the sexual encounters with Dugas outlined in that paper. This has been known for more than 20 years.
The problems with the paper are: 1) a few gay men are highly sexually active and sleep with 100+ partners per year; 2) it takes many years for overt illness to appear; and 3) HIV is not highly infectious. As a result, those early AIDS patients may have had dozens of exposures to the virus over the years before encountering Dugas. Within the gay community there is a smallish subset who are hyper sexually active, and they are all sexually connected to each other, with only a few degrees of separation, at least within a particular city. At that point you're just playing the Kevin Bacon game; you can connect anyone to anyone else, and draw a graph however you like.
You do realize that guns quite frequently kill innocent bystanders?
You do realize that a huge effort has been put forth to prevent and treat HIV?
It is very possible he was a deist or a Unitarian (19th century definition not modern definition). He certainly wasn't what most Christians today would describe as a Christian. For example it is believed that he didn't believe in Jesus as being God, he didn't believe in the trinity.
A lot of the educated class in the US didn't believe in Christianity the way modern Christians do. Most of the founders weren't traditional Christians, George Washington certainly wasn't; he specifically requested not to have a Christian ceremony at his funeral.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Lincoln was an atheist, so if by chance there is a heaven, Lincoln isn't in it.
So, you purport to be sitting on the definitive rules for who gets in and who doesn't, do you?
That's a tad presumptuous, I'd say.
As an agnostic, I make no such claim. Most Christians today (in the US at least) would claim you have to accept Jesus as savior to get into heaven.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
AIDS did not fit the pattern of any known communicable disease. From basic principles, the hypothesis of a virus was obvious. But how do you prove it? When your patient succumbs to TB, you need hard evidence to blame a virus that no test exists for. The autopsy says the death was caused by TB, right?
Furthermore, there were peculiarities about the viral counts, especially with those early inaccurate tests, that offered a rational counterargument. One patient seems healthy with high viral counts. Another is dying with low viral counts. How does that work? You need to really understand the disease to track it sensibly over the course of years, with accurate tests.
And there were a few counter-theories. Specifically, Peter Duesberg (google him) seized on the confusion around viral counts to argue that HIV did not cause AIDS. I would say that sound minds recognized that Duesberg was almost certainly wrong, but his arguments made a significant degree of scientific sense in the context of the not very reliable data that existed in the early 1980s. Of course, he is infamous for repeating arguments long past the point where better data demolished his counter-theory.
Matthew Modine is great in that movie. And it's an excellent movie that captures the thinking of the medical community at the time. People forget, there was a lot of fear about AIDS back then -- from all parts of society, including political (Reagan).
Not requiring something by law is not the same as not having it.
There are worker populations that can have informal sick leave, and there are populations that would abuse the fuck out of it.
Many nations also require a doctor's note for any sick leave longer than one day.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
As an example the percentage of people with HIV has increased in Austin, Texas by 41% or so from 2006 to 2012.
Proving nothing.
1 - Austin population has grown by 15% in that time
2 - A proportion of those people with HIV will be heterosexual
3 - Between 1990 and 2010 the number of same-sex couples in Austin grew at a rate of three times the city population growth rate. Yep, Austin got more gay.
Add those three together and I'd say it's rather likely that the extent of HIV infection in the gay community in Austin has probably dropped, thus entirely fucking disproving the ignorant shit you were claiming.
Actually I kinda like "garbage-people" better. Troll sounds comical, but garbage pretty much describes the worth of these individuals.
A lot of times where "suddenly" we find a lot of cases of a particular disease/disorder/etc is not because it sprang out of nowhere, but because testing that recognised it and/or confirmed it became more established.
It's kinda like various things that can affect your mental state (Alzheimer's etc). We've getting a lot more data and starting to learn more about it, and it seems like suddenly it's a big deal but reality is back in the day it was just "crazy aunt Doris" etc etc.
Fortunately for you the same religion prevents you being quarantined to prevent your transmissible memetics polluting our future gene pool.
You appear to have missed him stating
Don't pretend there is something wrong with this.
Which you've just implicitly done. Well done.
While that possibility cannot be entirely eliminated, it is highly unlikely. Consuming chimps as bushmeat was a common practice, but they seldom make convenient sexual partners.
There is no vaccine for HIV yet.
Not for lack of trying. Scientists have been working on it for years, and a few hopefuls made it to clinical trials, but nothing has proven reliable yet. HIV mutates like crazy - no matter what scientists come up with, the virus always manages to evolve a workaround. It's so adaptable that even when treating a single patient with antiretrovirals, the drugs have to be changed after a time because the virus evolves resistance.
Arguing about the religion of politicians is seldom worthwhile. They lie. Even Lincoln. You don't get elected without a good instinct for which beliefs to proclaim from your podium and which are too dangerous to ever admit.
Lol, there it is in al its dumb boasting delusuinal splendor, you couldnt win on an all red roulette wheel betting on red.
In fact, the lack of bolding and short post idicates you are just a copy cat rather than the original APK, he couldnt possibly be so concise. The kind of mental illness needed to imitate APK is alarming.
Potatoes, beans and sausage.
But you got it right when you said "twice". The answer is "pretty much the same with a slight cheesy undertone". Frigging hell.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
In 1970 it wasn't even a syndrome yet. One statistic (I suspect outdated) claims 32 people died of AIDS in the USA before the end of 1980.
You're asking a lot. Do you realize how many people die young of not obvious causes every year.
Individual doctors had patients immune systems fail. What would you have them do?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Clearly you're not trying hard enough. I think you'll have to advocate the use of nuclear weapons for the rest of us to be sure of your sexual purity.
I guess it's fashionable to complain about Slashdot, but a lot of other sites are hardly any better. The comments sections in Washington Post & USA Today come to mind.
And of course YouTube famously has low quality comments as noted by xkcd.
- ------ Go 'til ya know.
The world had the skills to track the eradication globally of smallpox. So some skill to track the more interesting medical issues had to exist at that time per city, state, within the USA federally.
I was really hoping for autopsy policy, costs per state, city, ability to request different lab work if any. Did a medical autopsy get requested if the hospital paperwork covered for the reporting?
Was an autopsy reserved for mostly police and court work as policy and not medical research as it would question treatment issues?
If outsiders don't look for issues, a teaching hospital never mades mistakes and the self signed paperwork is all that is needed?
So I was hoping for some insights into the lack of lab work. A no autopsy policy? Lack of lab funding? Lack of staff skills? Has the policy changed?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The nations maybe not, but the employers routinely do. And frankly, I can well understand that.
In my country you can be sick a lot before your employer can simply kick you out, and he even has to keep paying your wage for the first month, so I do indeed think they're entitled to get a doctor's notice instead of just you saying "not coming today, boss".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Thats much better Alex, boldng is back again, its sounding more like the real you. I consider every moment you spend posting to me a win, a sacrifice that keeps you from trolling someone else, plus its so amusing. :)
I didnt forget to pst anon my boy, I just dont care, its not like anyone that is going to mod me down for trolling you.
Also, the syphillis entry sore can be somewhere inside, where it can't be seen.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Also, multiple exposures may matter.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
And if the gay community hadn't been so unlucky as to be the first major group infected, thus giving researchers a hint that a vector/transmission process was involved, it might have taken another 20 years to identify the cause among the hundreds of other chronic and marginal health conditions.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Lack of ability to make correlations among lots of scattered data.
Pre-interent, you couldn't just search some online database to find papers that mentioned factors common to your research; you had to trawl through dozens of (very expensive) dead-tree medical journals and basically find a few hits by luck and perhaps experience (eg. knowing whose work to follow, and where they usually published).
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Smallpox was pretty obvious by reasonably consistent overt symptoms, and had also been known since ancient times (also, the correlation with immunity via cowpox had been understood for centuries). To widely deter smallpox, we only had to wait for the most primitive vaccine technology to arrive, and no new research was required to ID the cause. No guessing in the dark based on a plethora of vague symptoms that may or may not manifest over years or even decades.
In fact, some early vaccines (including the first one for smallpox) were produced before the concept of viruses existed, because the disease was easily recognised, and immunity transfer by some (then unknown) blood factor was fairly easy to accomplish even if no one understood why it worked.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Considering that the older researchers probably remembered the era of crackpot medicine and patent cure-alls being pushed even by people you'd think would know better, one can't blame them for being skeptical, at least until better data arrived.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
(starts a few minutes in)
Some of the presentations touch on specialty vaccine research for diseases like HIV and ebola.
Gad, when I was a biochem/microbiol student at MSU, virology was ONE class. We've come a long long way in a very short time.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Why would there be a reason to suspect a virus? Patient X comes to your office wasting away with a bizarre form of cancer. The patient has cancer, okay. Patient Y is hospitalized with a rare form of pneumonia and dies. The patient died from pneumonia. Nobody, but nobody, was looking for bacteriological or viral causes of transmission of this 'syndrome.' A 'syndrome' by its definition is a collection of symptoms that are related. Remember, most doctors are NOT researchers. They are akin to car mechanics for humans.
He's right IF it means that the petroleum jelly caused condom failures, which it can...
Yep, Im proud to troll APK, It is so amusing. Just as an AC bleating about someone posting anonymously is most amusing.
I have no desire for your uselss malware, I use no script and ad block, not one trojan or virus ever.
The last century called, want their ad blocking back.
PS,
I have a great life full of good friends and fun, and unlike you I log in and take responsibility for my action, whilst you, Dickless, run around here trolling with your irrelevant bullshit all the time.
Its so much fun trolling you, you always bite back, and eachtime look more pathetic and childish.
By all means keep going, its most amusing to me.