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Health/Medical
See other Health/Medical Articles

Title: How the AIDS epidemic really began
Source: New York Post
URL Source: http://nypost.com/2015/02/22/how-the-aids-epidemic-really-began/
Published: Feb 22, 2015
Author: Stephen Lynch
Post Date: 2015-02-24 05:17:17 by Tooconservative
Keywords: HIV, AIDS
Views: 2091
Comments: 7

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.

  • 1908: Research reveals “AIDS began with a spillover from one chimp to one human, in or near a small southeastern wedge of Cameroon, around 1908,” Quammen writes. The most likely way it jumped species was through a person Quammen calls the “Cut Hunter” — a man who hunted and butchered a chimpanzee infected with simian immunodeficiency virus and was wounded in the process. The chimp’s blood mingled with his through the cuts in his skin.
  • 1910s-20s: Chances are the Cut Hunter infected only one other person, and HIV likely spread on a one-to-one basis through sexual contact, working its way down the Sangha River in Cameroon to the Congo, eventually reaching the city of Leopoldville (later Kinshasa). Why did no one notice? Life expectancy in that time and place wasn’t that high. And the infected were likely to die of some other common disease, with no one suspecting that their immune systems were compromised.
  • 1920s-50s: Colonial officials were conducting massive health campaigns in Africa to treat tropical diseases. Quammen notes that the treatment for one ailment, caused by tsetse flies, required 36 injections over three years. But hypodermic syringes were rare commodities, made out of glass and metal. They were used over and over again. “Once the reusable needles and syringes had put the virus into enough people — say, several hundred — it wouldn’t come to a dead end, it wouldn’t burn out, and sexual transmission could do the rest,” Quammen writes. Meanwhile, Kinshasa’s population exploded. Between 1940 and 1960, the city grew from 49,000 people to about 400,000.
  • 1960: Belgium abruptly gives up the Congo as a colony as forces led by Mobutu Sese Seko overthrow the government. The Belgian regime, Quammen notes, had discouraged education among its colonial subjects; there were no Congolese doctors. Instead, those ranks were filled by French-speaking Haitians who fled home after the government fell. “Someone brought back to Haiti, along with Congolese memories, a dose of HIV-1, Group M, Subtype B,” Quammen writes.
  • 1969: But how does one infected Haitian lead to an outbreak that, according to 1982 blood tests, results in 7.8 percent of women in a Port-au-Prince slum having HIV? Again, needles. In the early 1970s, a plasma-donation clinic, run by a Miami investor, opened in Haiti offering residents $3 per liter. Shared needles at this clinic likely increased the infection rates in Haiti and shipped the disease to the United States in frozen blood plasma. Research indicates that just a single migration of the virus — ­either one infected person or one container of plasma — accounted for bringing AIDS to America. “That sorry advent had occurred in 1969, plus or minus about three years,” Quammen writes.
  • 1980: The disease lurked in America for a decade before anyone noticed. “It reached hemophiliacs through the blood supply,” Quammen writes. “It reached drug addicts through shared needles. It reached gay men … by sexual transmission, possibly from an initial contact between two males, an American and a Haitian.” In 1980, Michael Gottlieb, an assistant professor at UCLA Medical Center, noticed a number of gay men suffering from pneumonia because of weakened immune systems. He wrote a short piece about it in 1981 for the Centers for Disease Control newsletter. A similar cluster is documented in New York. At the same time, a group of heterosexual Haitian immigrants in Miami are found to suffer from symptoms similar to Gottlieb’s patients.

They are the first warnings of what is happening.

(2 images)

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#1. To: TooConservative (#0)

In other words, AIDS was spread by modern medicine.

Perhaps the Jehovah's Witnesses are wiser than we know in refusing all blood.

Vicomte13  posted on  2015-02-25   17:13:33 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#2. To: Vicomte13 (#1)

In other words, AIDS was spread by modern medicine.

Kind of hard to escape that conclusion, eh? At the very least, the re-use of needles and syringes in the Third World.

Anyway, I like this very short summary of what modern molecular biology and DNA studies have revealed. For decades, we had a lot of misinformation. Now we know a lot more and the picture is very different.

Tooconservative  posted on  2015-02-25   23:25:12 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#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.

“Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rapidly promoted by mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.”

CZ82  posted on  2015-02-26   8:21:49 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#4. To: CZ82 (#3)

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.

Tooconservative  posted on  2015-02-26   9:44:55 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#5. To: TooConservative (#4)

A first-rate education (Yale, Rhodes, Oxford).

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.

“Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rapidly promoted by mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.”

CZ82  posted on  2015-02-26   14:01:07 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#6. To: TooConservative, CZ82, Vicomte13 (#2)

Anyway, I like this very short summary of what modern molecular biology and DNA studies have revealed. For decades, we had a lot of misinformation. Now we know a lot more and the picture is very different.

Or, perhaps we are being fed this version of HIV spreading around the world by the homosexual lobby.

Yet they will still deny the most common way HIV is sexually transmitted is through sodomy.

Those cases of HIV exploding in one decade did not happen in monogamous relations.

"Now godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out." (1 Timothy 6:6-7)

redleghunter  posted on  2015-02-26   14:42:40 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#7. To: redleghunter (#6)

Or, perhaps we are being fed this version of HIV spreading around the world by the homosexual lobby.

Have you been hanging out with that Deckard kid? LOL.

No, I don't think anyone is actually hiding anything or that this is an attempt to cover up the basic facts about the spread of HIV.

Tooconservative  posted on  2015-02-26   16:46:41 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


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