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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
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 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.
"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.