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Health/Medical Title: How the AIDS epidemic really began In Randy Shilts history of AIDS, And the Band Played On, he tells the story of an Air Canada steward named Gaëtan Dugas, who suffered from what Dugas called gay cancer and infected 40 people or more with HIV. He was, Shilts wrote, Patient Zero. Dugas, through his extensive travels and unrepentant, unprotected sex even after he was diagnosed, undoubtedly helped spread AIDS. But was he the man who brought the disease to America? In the new book The Chimp and the River: How AIDS Emerged from an African Rain Forest (W.W. Norton), author David Quammen says no. Dugas himself was infected by some other human, presumably during a sexual encounter and not in Africa . . . somewhere closer to home, Quammen writes. As evidence now shows, HIV had already arrived in North America when Gaëtan Dugas was a virginal adolescent. Using molecular genetics, researchers have now traced the exact strain of HIV that became a pandemic HIV-1, Group M, Subtype B to its original source. Amazingly, through examination of genetic samples from humans and chimps, Quammen reveals scientists have found exactly when and where AIDS started even a probable theory as to how. They are the first warnings of what is happening. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top Page Up Full Thread Page Down Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 5.
#3. To: TooConservative (#0)
The guy is a professional author and tree hugger who has to rely on information from others that may or may not be accurate.
A first-rate education (Yale, Rhodes, Oxford). Written for National Geographic and other science/nature periodicals for decades, written a lot about the Ebola outbreak. Lives in Montana for decades, apparently loves trout fishing. Your cookie-cutter accusation that he's just another tree-hugger doesn't move me much. It seems unlikely he fits the mold as much as you want to assume. You are suggesting that molecular biologists have some ax to grind to conceal the origins of HIV or that somehow the truth is being kept from the public. The real truth is that the public just is too stupid to be interested in the question of the origin of AIDS. And that is because it is just some boring science thing. The only reason anyone cared about it to begin with was because the .gov was trying to scare them to death over it. Which worked as well as scaring the public into the Iraq invasion so I guess you have to bet with the cynics on the general gullibility and mental laziness of the average American. This book is apparently a followup to his 2012 book, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.
That doesn't impress me one lick, how many politicians/judges have the same and are total ideological idiots? My point was he is only repeating what others have said before, which may not even be true.
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