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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.
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.
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
I think I remember reading about a study done in Africa where somebody found old blood samples from the 1950s (maybe earlier?), tested them for HIV antibodies, and found not one, but *several* that subsequent testing confirmed. HIV might not have reached *America* until the 60s or 70s, but it was *definitely* making its way around Africa at least a decade or two earlier.
According to TFA, apes in Africa conspired to spread it to humans around the beginning of the 20th century.
Yeah, we may not be able to blame Dugas for bringing AIDS to the US, but the man was a psychopath. He had unprotected sex with hundreds of men after he was made aware of the fact he had "gay cancer", a fatal infectious disease spread by sexual contact.
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.
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.
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.
The current research I've read seems to suggest that the first HIV infections probably happened 70 or 80 years ago. One would also imagine that the virus, not really evolved fine tuning for humans, might have exhibited more muted symptoms (or conversely, it might have been much more lethal, like some other viruses are, and burn themselves out by killing hosts too quickly). In developing countries a lot of things can kill a person before they die of an HIV infection, so it probably simply wasn't noticed until it had found its way to a country where life expectancy and general health was much higher.
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.
"'No one should be blamed for the spread of viruses,' Worobey said."
Wait, is he a researcher or a spokesman for Microsoft?
"... 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.
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.
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"
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.
Not true. They knew they had a deadly STD on their hands and they knew he was infected. And they told him. Between that time and his death he had unprotected sex with more than 250 men. He knew he had "the gay cancer" and even told a guy, after sex, "now you have it too". That's pathological lack of empathy, not a lack of information.
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."
> "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!
Browse Slashdot with 'Newest First'!
"...And the Band Played On." which goes into that.
Best Slashdot Co
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.
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.
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.
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.