The Crossing Of Hiv From Chimpanzees To Humans
The hunter-theory is the most commonly accepted today indicating that the virus crossed to humans as a result of consuming chimpanzee meat along with the primates blood engaging in contact with the hunters through open wounds or cuts.
The researchers indicate we now have four main strains of HIV-M, N, O, and P each which has a slightly different genes. This explains the key reason why there are plenty of strains of HIV-1 in humans considering another type of strain of SIV could cross to the human on every occasion they consumed the meat.
The most studied and researched strain is HIV-1 group M, car without any vast spread across the globe and answerable for nearly all HIV infections.
The Hiv Conspiracy Theory
There are a few different ideas that have been put forward to explain how HIV came about. The two thrown around most, , are: The government did it, or It was definitely people having sex with monkeys!
There are lots of conspiracy theories surrounding HIV some people do not believe it causes AIDS at all, and others believe that HIV is a man-made virus.
According to a 2005 survey of African Americans living in the US, almost 50% of the respondents believed that HIV was manufactured in a lab. Furthermore, over 25% believed that this was done by the government. A significant number also believed that it was created in order to control the population of black people/homosexuals.
There is absolutely no evidence in support these theories and a lot of evidence to suggest they’re baloney. Some of the earliest documented cases of HIV were in the late 1950s its absurd to think that scientists would have had the knowledge or technology to create viruses back then. We only identified the structure of DNA in 1953. Weve only just managed to create the first synthetic bacterial genome, let alone create a virus from scratch.
Creating a virus would require knowledge of genetic manipulation. We simply did not have the expertise to be able to achieve something like this at that time.
Case Definition For Epidemiological Surveillance
According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2008, a team led by Robert Shafer at Stanford University School of Medicine has discovered that the gray mouse lemur has an endogenouslentivirus in its genetic makeup. This suggests that lentiviruses have existed for at least 14 million years, much longer than the currently known existence of HIV. In addition, the time frame falls in the period when Madagascar was still connected to what is now the African continent the said lemurs later developed immunity to the virus strain and survived an era when the lentivirus was widespread among other mammals. The study is being hailed as crucial, because it fills the blanks in the origin of the virus, as well as in its evolution, and may be important in the development of new antiviral drugs.
In 2010, researchers reported that SIV had infected monkeys in Bioko for at least 32,000 years. Previous to this time, it was thought that SIV infection in monkeys had happened over the past few hundred years. Scientists estimated that it would take a similar amount of time before humans adapted naturally to HIV infection in the way monkeys in Africa have adapted to SIV and not suffer any harm from the infection.
Read Also: Can Hiv Cause Hair Loss
Pop Culture Opens Up Conversations About Hiv
Actor Rock Hudson was the first major public figure to acknowledge he had AIDS. After he died in 1985, he left $250,000 to set up an AIDS foundation. Elizabeth Taylor was the national chairperson until her death in 2011. Princess Diana also made international headlines after she shook hands with someone with HIV.
Pop culture icon Freddie Mercury, singer for the band Queen, also passed away from AIDS-related illnesses in 1991. Since then many other celebrities have revealed that theyre HIV-positive. More recently, Charlie Sheen announced his status on national television.
In 1995, the National Association of People with AIDS founded National HIV Testing Day. Organizations, conventions, and communities continue to fight the stigmas attached to this infection.
How Did Hiv Originate
It has been suggested that HIV is said to have originated from a particular species of chimpanzee. This was stated at the most recent presentation at the 6th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Chicago in January 1999.
At the conference it was suggested that HIV had entered the human population through blood contact that occurred during hunting and field dressing of the animals. Findings at this conference provide the strongest evidence to date that HIV-1 originated in non human primates.
It is known that the virus has existed in the United States, Haiti and Africa since at least 1977-1978.
In 1979 doctors in Los Angeles and New York reported rare kinds of pneumonia, cancer and other illnesses, these rare conditions were not usually found in people with a healthy immune system.
It was in 1982 that the centers for Disease Control and Prevention officially named the condition AIDS In 1984 the virus responsible for the weakening of the immune system was identified as HIV (Human Immunodeficiency.
Also Check: Does Nba Youngboy Have Hiv
Are There Any Other Plausible Hypotheses About The Role Of Western Science Or Medicine In Transferring The Virus From Chimpanzees To Humans
Although the oral polio vaccine hypothesis may be fatally wounded in the view of Preston Marx of Tulane University Primate Centre, that doesn’t exclude other iatrogenic possibilities. Marx presented his research into the potential role of unsterile injecting equipment not only in spreading HIV, but in turning it into an aggressive human immunodeficiency virus in the first place.
Had something occurred to amplify the virulence of HIV-1 after its transfer from chimpanzees? It is known that SIV becomes more aggressive if passaged through a new host, especially if the index case is experiencing primary infection. Might HIV-1 not do the same? And what would provide the most efficient means of passaging HIV through multiple hosts?
Animals will always provide a reservoir for viruses which could threaten human populations, no matter how conceited we become about our ability to manage the world of microbes and their genetic code. As organiser Robin Weiss pointed out, “There are lots of instances of transfer of other retroviruses from animals to humans”. But humans too have the potential to wreak terrible havoc, and the Royal Society meeting was a welcome opportunity to review concerns about the potential role of medical science in causing or amplifying the HIV epidemic. “There is good veterinary and human evidence of iatrogenic transfer of retroviruses”, Robin Weiss told the meeting.
Origin And Distribution Of Sivgor
HIV-1 origins. The phylogenetic relationships of representative SIVcpz, HIV-1, and SIVgor strains are shown for a region of the viral pol gene . SIVcpz and SIVgor sequences are shown in black and green, respectively. The four groups of HIV-1, each of which represents an independent cross-species transmission, are shown in different colors. Black circles indicate the four branches where cross-species transmission-to-humans has occurred. White circles indicate two possible alternative branches on which chimpanzee-to-gorilla transmission occurred. Brackets at the right denote SIVcpz from P. t. troglodytes and P. t. schweinfurthii , respectively. The phylogenetic tree was estimated using maximum likelihood methods . The scale bar represents 0.05 nucleotide substitutions per site.
Don’t Miss: What Do Hiv Bumps Look Like
Tracing The Origin And History Of The Hiv
See allHide authors and affiliations
The Aids Epidemic Arises
Though HIV arrived in the United States around 1970, it didnt come to the publics attention until the early 1980s.
In 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report about five previously healthy homosexual men becoming infected with Pneumocystis pneumonia, which is caused by the normally harmless fungus Pneumocystis jirovecii. This type of pneumonia, the CDC noted, almost never affects people with uncompromised immune systems.
The following year, The New York Times published an alarming article about the new immune system disorder, which, by that time, had affected 335 people, killing 136 of them. Because the disease appeared to affect mostly homosexual men, officials initially called it gay-related immune deficiency, or GRID.
Though the CDC discovered all major routes of the diseases transmissionas well as that female partners of AIDS-positive men could be infectedin 1983, the public considered AIDS a gay disease. It was even called the gay plague for many years after.
In September of 1982, the CDC used the term AIDS to describe the disease for the first time. By the end of the year, AIDS cases were also reported in a number of European countries.
Read Also: Does Nba Youngboy Have Hiv
Origin Of Aids Linked To Colonial Practices In Africa
- EmbedEmbed
- Transcript
Monday marks the 25th anniversary of the first report of AIDS. But only recently have scientists come to conclusions about where HIV came from. The current thinking is that the colonial horrors of mid-20th-century Africa allowed the virus to jump from chimpanzees to humans and become established in human populations around 1930. But there is still uncertainty as to why AIDS was first discovered in Los Angeles and New York, and not Cameroon, where scientists say it surely started.
LIANE HANSEN, host:
Twenty-five years ago tomorrow, doctors in Los Angeles first reported cases of what turned out to be the global catastrophe we now know as AIDS. Since then, 55 million people have been infected with the AIDS virus, and it kills around 8,000 people a day.
In the days surrounding the anniversary, NPR is broadcasting a number of stories about AIDS and its effect around the world. Today we examine its origins. Scientists, politicians, and conspiracy theorists have debated for years where AIDS began. Recently, researchers found the missing link: the immediate ancestor of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus.
NPR’s Richard Knox reports that the discovery clarifies the story of how a chimpanzee virus touched off the deadliest pandemic since the Middle Ages.
RICHARD KNOX reporting:
Prof. MOORE: For me, as a comparative primatologist, the more interesting question is why didn’t it happen sooner?
KNOX: With unsterilized syringes.
KNOX: And maybe dozens of others.
Samples Collected From Wildlife In Thailand
While its true that most emerging diseases affecting humans come from wildlife, its often human behavior that is to blame for the spillover. Humans are tearing down forests and hunting, eating, and selling wild animals at unprecedented rates. Each exotic animal shipped across the ocean to be sold as a pet is an sveacasino opportunity for a new pathogen to take root in a new continent. Each tree ripped from its roots increases interactions between humans and wild animals, and thus the odds that viruses will find new populations to infect.
But the good news is: If were the ones causing the problem, were the ones who can stop it.
At EcoHealth Alliance, were striving toward a world where pandemics like the one caused by HIV/AIDS are a thing of the past. Join us.
Don’t Miss: Cookie Johnson Hiv Positive
Can I Catch Aids From Casual Contact
Many people are scared to come in contact with someone that has AIDS but it is not a contagious disease that you can catch by just casual contact.
It is not transmitted by normal day to day contact in the home nor at the workplace or schools and social occasions.
* You can not catch AIDS by :* Shaking hands.* A doorknob.* From food.
You should realize that HIV does not live long outside the body, it is a fragile virus. It is not airborne or a food borne virus.
The only way to get infected with HIV is through the blood or it is sexually transmitted, these are the only ways that HIV can get into your body.
To remain safe always use protection when having sex, one night of passion could lead to a lifetime of hell.
Always remember that even if you have been with your partner for a few years HIV can take up to ten or more years to reveal its true nature, and if your partner has had other partners or short time relationships you could still be at risk if your partner has not had a blood test to establish his or her health risks.
End of part 2 Next
Homeless People And Intravenous Drug Users In New York
A volunteer social worker called Betty Williams, a Quaker who worked with the homeless in New York from the seventies and early eighties onwards, has talked about people at that time whose death would be labelled as “junkie flu” or “the dwindles”. In an interview for the Act Up Oral History Project in 2008, she said: “Of course, the horror stories came, mainly concerning women who were injection-drug users … who had PCP pneumonia , and were told that they just had bronchitis.” She continues: “I actually believe that AIDS kind of existed among this group of people first, because if you look back, there was something called junkie pneumonia, there was something called the dwindles that addicts got, and I think this was another early AIDS population way too helpless to ever do anything for themselves on their own behalf.”
Julia Epstein writes in her book Altered Conditions: Disease, Medicine and Storytelling that: “As we uncover more of the early history of HIV infection, it becomes clear that by at least the 1970s the virus was already making major inroads into the immune systems of a number of diverse populations in the United States and had for some time been causing devastation in several countries in Africa.”
Don’t Miss: Does Cookie Johnson Have Hiv
The History Of Aids In Africa
It all started as a rumour Then we found we were dealing with a disease. Then we realised that it was an epidemic. And, now we have accepted it as a tragedy. – Chief epidemiologist in Kampala, Uganda
There is now conclusive evidence that HIV originated in Africa. A 10-year study completed in 2005 found a strain of Simian Immunodeficiency Virus in a number of chimpanzee colonies in south-east Cameroon that was a viral ancestor of the HIV-1 that causes AIDS in humans.
A complex computer model of the evolution of HIV-1 has suggested that the first transfer of SIV to humans occurred around 1930, with HIV-2 transferring from monkeys found in Guinea-Bissau, at some point in the 1940s .
Studies of primates in other continents did not find any trace of SIV, leading to the conclusion that HIV originated in Africa.
The 1960s- Early cases of AIDSExperts studying the spread of the epidemic suggest that about 2,000 people in Africa may have been infected with HIV by the 1960s. Stored blood samples from an American malaria research project carried out in the Congo in 1959 prove one such example of early HIV infection.The 1970s The first AIDS epidemicIt was in Kinshasa in the 1970s that the first epidemic of HIV/AIDS is believed to have occurred. The emerging epidemic in the Congolese capital was signalled by a surge in opportunistic infections, such as cryptococcal meningitis, Kaposis sarcoma, tuberculosis and specific forms of pneumonia.
Confusion, stigma and despondence
Roll Out
Chimp Siv Is Different
Chimpanzee SIV is an exception. Two papers published last summer point out that the SIV carried by chimpanzees appears to be a recombinant of SIVs carried by cercopithecids, upon which chimpanzees prey. As chimpanzee SIV appears to be most similar to HIV, it will aid in our understanding of the infectivity of HIV to find out how SIVcpz evolved and whether chimpanzees, which still prey on monkeys, are being reinfected. Because SIVcpz apparently is the root of HIV-1, it is essential that researchers understand where it came from.
There are four subspecies of chimpanzees: Pan troglodytes troglodytes, Pan troglodytes verus, Pan troglodytes vellerosus, and Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii. P. t. troglodytes is the subspecies present in Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and Republic of the Congo. The SIV that infects this subspecies is similar to all known groups of HIV-1. A small percentage of P. t. schweinfurthii, which is endemic to the area east of the southward-flowing Ubangi River, also carries a chimpanzee SIV. That SIV, however, differs from the one that infects P. t. troglodytes and has not so far been implicated in human disease.
But, says Marx, the next question is not just how and where SIV jumped from nonhuman primates, but what makes HIV infectious and transmissible in humans. Answers to these questions may aid in determining why HIV makes humans very, very sick, while SIV causes no disease in other higher primates.
Don’t Miss: How Long Does Hiv Live On Surfaces
Where Did Hiv Come From A Look At The Origins Of The Pandemic Of Our Time
A chimpanzees virus has killed 35 million humans.
That virus, commonly known as HIV, is the defining pandemic of our time. More than 35 million people have been killed by the virus to date. But the virus itself didnt get its start in humans.
HIV/AIDS is, like the vast majority of emerging viruses infecting people, zoonotic in nature. The AIDS crisis, as we generally think of it, began in the 1980s. First as a mysterious illness primarily infecting gay men in urban areas in the United States. But thats not really the beginning. Before the diseases first mention in 1982 in the New York Times, people had been dying of AIDS for at least a decade, though probably not much longer. In Africa, HIVthe virus that causes AIDShad jumped from chimpanzees to humans sometime early in the 20th century.
To date, the earliest known case of HIV-1 infection in human blood is from a sample taken in 1959 from a man whod died in Kinshasa in what was then the Belgian Congo.
Its this fact which keeps me awake at night. Imagine, for a moment, that the HIV virus in that 1959 sample had been studied and identified. If, in the 1950s, the scientific community realized the potential harm this new virus could unleash. What could we have done? What therapies could we have developed before it became one of the deadliest pandemics in human history? Would we have a cure by now?
That work takes several forms, including: