Origin of HIV and AIDS
The origin of the HIV viruses and AIDS is still a mystery. There have been many theories but none so far has been proven. During the early stages of the AIDS epidemic the flimsiest evidence was used to blame AIDS on Haitians and Africans. In this session, four theories about the origin of HIV and AIDS are discussed:
I. Isolated Community Theory: The AIDS virus has always existed in a small isolated group of people. The virus then was passed to an outsider and spread from there.
II. Green Monkey Theory: A variation of this theory is that the virus was present in an animal where it did not cause disease and in some way was transferred to humans where it caused disease. The animal that has received most attention as a possible source has been the African Green Monkey. The evidence that appeared to support this is that the virus HIV-2 is genetically similar to a virus called 'Simian Immune-deficiency Virus (SIV) which was found in some monkey. Reason for doubting the Green Monkey Theory is that, as SIV is closer to HIV2, the theory would predict that HIV2 would have appeared first.
III. Germ warfare Theory: The theory that HIV was produced by the American military as a germ warfare agent is based on a paper published by three East German scientists in 1986.
IV. Mutation Theory: Viruses are continually changing and mutating into new strains. It seems a highly likely hypothesis that a mutation took place in a virus to produce a new virus with the deadly properties of HIV (John Hubley, 1998, pp. 31-33).
AIDS was first described in 1981, when previously healthy young adults-mainly men living in urban areas of the United States-began falling ill with opportunistic infections previously unknown among this age group. Similar infections were soon described in Africa, the Caribbean and Europe; AIDS was clearly an epidemic disease. Most of these young people died, and a host of discrepant hypotheses emerged, but a blood-borne viral pathogen was suspected early on. In 1983, this suspicion was confirmed when Professor Luc Montagnier and others discovered a novel pathogen: a retrovirus tropic for the CD4 cells that orchestrate cell-mediated immunity and protect humans from a broad range of viral, mycobacterial, and fungal pathogens (Sharma, 2006, p. 3).
HIV is not-so-ancient history. Ancient Egyptians described diabetes on a scrap of papyrus 3500 years ago. Two thousand four hundred years ago, Parkinson's was first outlined in a Chinese medical text. And Chinese, Greek, Roman, and Indian civilizations had all recognized malaria long before we had microscopes to observe the parasites that cause the disease. By comparison, HIV is a distinctly modern disease (Understanding Evolution: HIV's not-so-ancient history, 2010).
Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) sequences that pre-date the recognition of AIDS are critical to defining the time of origin and the timescale of virus evolution. A viral sequence from 1959 (ZR59) is the oldest known HIV-1 infection. Other historically documented sequences, important calibration points to convert evolutionary distance into time, are lacking, however; ZR59 is the only one sampled before 1976. Here we report the amplification and characterization of viral sequences from a Bouin‘s-fixed paraffin-embedded lymph node biopsy specimen obtained in 1960 from an adult female in Léopoldville, Belgian Congo (now Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)), and we use them to conduct the first comparative evolutionary genetic study of early pre-AIDS epidemic HIV-1 group M viruses. (Michael Worobey, 2008, p. 461)
The origin of the HIV viruses and AIDS is still a mystery. There have been many theories but none so far has been proven. During the early stages of the AIDS epidemic the flimsiest evidence was used to blame AIDS on Haitians and Africans. In this session, four theories about the origin of HIV and AIDS are discussed:
I. Isolated Community Theory: The AIDS virus has always existed in a small isolated group of people. The virus then was passed to an outsider and spread from there.
II. Green Monkey Theory: A variation of this theory is that the virus was present in an animal where it did not cause disease and in some way was transferred to humans where it caused disease. The animal that has received most attention as a possible source has been the African Green Monkey. The evidence that appeared to support this is that the virus HIV-2 is genetically similar to a virus called 'Simian Immune-deficiency Virus (SIV) which was found in some monkey. Reason for doubting the Green Monkey Theory is that, as SIV is closer to HIV2, the theory would predict that HIV2 would have appeared first.
III. Germ warfare Theory: The theory that HIV was produced by the American military as a germ warfare agent is based on a paper published by three East German scientists in 1986.
IV. Mutation Theory: Viruses are continually changing and mutating into new strains. It seems a highly likely hypothesis that a mutation took place in a virus to produce a new virus with the deadly properties of HIV (John Hubley, 1998, pp. 31-33).
AIDS was first described in 1981, when previously healthy young adults-mainly men living in urban areas of the United States-began falling ill with opportunistic infections previously unknown among this age group. Similar infections were soon described in Africa, the Caribbean and Europe; AIDS was clearly an epidemic disease. Most of these young people died, and a host of discrepant hypotheses emerged, but a blood-borne viral pathogen was suspected early on. In 1983, this suspicion was confirmed when Professor Luc Montagnier and others discovered a novel pathogen: a retrovirus tropic for the CD4 cells that orchestrate cell-mediated immunity and protect humans from a broad range of viral, mycobacterial, and fungal pathogens (Sharma, 2006, p. 3).
HIV is not-so-ancient history. Ancient Egyptians described diabetes on a scrap of papyrus 3500 years ago. Two thousand four hundred years ago, Parkinson's was first outlined in a Chinese medical text. And Chinese, Greek, Roman, and Indian civilizations had all recognized malaria long before we had microscopes to observe the parasites that cause the disease. By comparison, HIV is a distinctly modern disease (Understanding Evolution: HIV's not-so-ancient history, 2010).
Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) sequences that pre-date the recognition of AIDS are critical to defining the time of origin and the timescale of virus evolution. A viral sequence from 1959 (ZR59) is the oldest known HIV-1 infection. Other historically documented sequences, important calibration points to convert evolutionary distance into time, are lacking, however; ZR59 is the only one sampled before 1976. Here we report the amplification and characterization of viral sequences from a Bouin‘s-fixed paraffin-embedded lymph node biopsy specimen obtained in 1960 from an adult female in Léopoldville, Belgian Congo (now Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)), and we use them to conduct the first comparative evolutionary genetic study of early pre-AIDS epidemic HIV-1 group M viruses. (Michael Worobey, 2008, p. 461)