Posted on 10/29/2007 8:04:41 PM PDT by blam
Aids study shows it arrived in US in 1960s
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Last Updated: 5:01pm GMT 29/10/2007
A widely-held theory of how Aids arrived in the west - as an infection carried by a promiscuous gay Canadian flight attendant - is overturned by a study published today that shows the American epidemic was born two decades earlier, during the sixties.
The western epidemic was first recognised in 1981 with an outbreak of a rare form of cancer among gay men in New York and California, along with a rash of seemingly healthy young men presenting with fevers, flu-like symptoms, and a rare pneumonia.
In his book, And the Band Played On, American journalist Randy Shilts identified "Patient Zero" as a gay Canadian flight attendant named Gaëtan Dugas, who died in 1984 after spreading the virus out of Africa to a number of homosexual partners in the west.
This theory, which made Gaetan a notorious benchmark for the spread of an epidemic that now affects 40 million people worldwide, is overturned today by a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which concludes the virus was incubating in the American population for much longer.
The path the strain took from its central African origins has long been debated, but the new study suggest that the simplest explanation is that the virus entered Haiti first, and then was transmitted to the United States, in or around 1969. Then HIV-1 circulated in the US for around a dozen years before the formal recognition of AIDS by doctors in 1981.
"Our results show that the strain of virus that spawned the U.S. AIDS epidemic probably arrived in or around 1969. That is earlier than a lot of people had imagined," said senior author Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, Tuscon.
The research is the first to definitively pinpoint when and from where HIV-1 entered the United States. "Patient Zero", ever since Shilts's book, has taken on an importance greater than perhaps deserved," Worobey told the Daily Telegraph.
"He was originally designated "patient O" as in "OUT of California" but that evolved into Patient Zero. He was certainly an early victim, and one linked to many other early cases," he said, though he added there is "no reason to mark him out as the likely index case for the US epidemic."
In fact "Haiti was the stepping stone the virus took when it left central Africa," said Worobey. "Once the virus got to the US then it just moved explosively around the world."
The strain that migrated to America in 1969 is the first human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) discovered and the dominant strain of the AIDS virus in most countries outside sub-Saharan Africa. Almost all the viruses in those countries descended from the one that emerged from Haiti, he said.
The team, which includes Andrew Rambaut at the University of Edinburgh, based on the conclusion on genetic analyses. The team analysed blood from five of the first Aids patients identified in the US, all of whom were recent immigrants from Haiti. The team also analysed genetic sequences from another 117 AIDS patients from around the world.
The team used statistical methods to investigate all the family trees that were consistent with the genetic data. For the hypothesis that, from Africa, HIV went to the US first, the probability is 0.003 percent -- virtually nil. For the hypothesis that HIV went from Africa first to Haiti in around 1966 and then on to the US, the probability is 99.8 percent, almost 100 percent.
"I am not sure the Gaetan idea is given much credence these days - our paper really more generally rules out the idea of specific individuals causing these epidemics," said Rambaut. "It is not the entry into the USA that is relevant here but the crossing of the virus into US risk groups."
Learning more about the genetic make-up of the various strains of HIV could help vaccine development, Worobey added. "The main challenge of developing a vaccine against HIV is its tremendous genetic diversity," he said. Knowing the gamut of diversity could be important.
The last genetic studies I remember reading traced HIV back to 1939 or thereabouts in Africa. But that date comes from assuming constant mutation rates, which is not always a valid assumption.
I remember that article too.
Probably the loosening of sexual mores that began in the late sixties. The disease has probably always been around; it's just that no one recognized it as a specific ailment until a lot of people from one or two particular demographic groups started getting it. Death would have been ascribed to the secondary conditions caused by HIV, not HIV itself.
somewhere in that study, they must have had to estimate the number of “partners” that gay men have in a lifetime
bet that number is way larger than the average heterosexual
The case of the sailor is unclear - the samples were contaminated in the laboratory.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_origin
***
1955-1957: British sailor
The oldest documented possible case of the then-unknown syndrome was thought to have been detected in 1959, when a 25-year-old British sailor who had traveled in the navy between 1955 and 1957 (but apparently not to Africa), sought help at the Royal Infirmary of Manchester, England. He reported to have been suffering from puzzling symptoms, among them purplish skin lesions, for nearly two years. His condition had taken a turn for worse during Christmas 1958, when he started suffering from shortness of breath, extreme fatigue, rapid weight loss, night sweats and high fever. The doctors thought he might be suffering from tuberculosis and, even though they found no evidence of bacterial infection, they treated him for tuberculosis just to be safe, to no avail. The sailor continued to weaken and he died shortly after in August 1959. His autopsy revealed evidence of two unusual infections, cytomegalovirus and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP, later, when redetermined as P. jirovecii, renamed Pneumocystis pneumonia), very rare at the time but now commonly associated with AIDS patients. His case had puzzled his doctors, who preserved tissue samples from him and for years retained some interest in solving the mystery. Sir Robert Platt, then president of the Royal College of Physicians, wrote in the sailor’s hospital chart that he wondered “if we are in for a new wave of virus disease now that the bacterial illnesses are so nearly conquered”. It was only 31 years later, after the AIDS pandemic had become well-known and widespread, that they decided to perform HIV-tests on the preserved tissues of the sailor, which initially turned out a positive result. The case was reported in the July 7, 1990 issue of the British medical journal The Lancet; their claim was retracted in a letter in the January 20, 1996 issue where they admitted that the tissue sample was contaminated in the laboratory (Corbitt G, Bailey A, Williams G. HIV infection in Manchester, 1959 . Lancet 1990; ii: 51.)[21][22]
1959: Congolese man
One of the earliest documented HIV-1 infection was discovered in a preserved blood sample taken in 1959 from a man from Leopoldville, Belgian Congo (now Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo).[23] However, it is unknown whether this anonymous person ever developed AIDS and died of its complications. [24]
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There is a poorly documented case of a waitress or stewardess (I forget which) on the West Coast who seemed to has what we’d call AIDS-like symptoms today... in 1954.
I read an article posted on Free Republic about a study about this. It found that 43% of male homosexuals had at least 500 sexual partners in a lifetime, and 28% had at least 1,000.
good grief, i find that to be disgusting
That’s exactly what I thought when I saw the year was 1969. Ted Kennedy has probably done more damage to the country than any one person in our history.
Yeah, I remember that study - I believe the University of Chicago sponsored it. I used to enjoy citing those statistics when some lamebrain would glowingly endorse homosexuality on the basis of "I think it's great that a man can love another man". Right....
I’m going to point out that whether or not this is a “gay disease or not, we need to find a real cure for it.
If you’d like a nightmare, let me give you one. Imagine if HIV-1 were an airbone or simple contact vector virus; in other words, if you could get it by simply breathing it in or by simple touch, like flu or colds. No, HIV isn’t that way ****right now****, but all it takes is a few favorable random mutations or some crazy b***ard in biosciences (and there are quite a few in the Middle East and Southeast Asia) to weaponize it.
Given HIV’s long “incubation” time, someone could deploy it *everywhere* in the Western world, and nobody would notice until it was far, far too late.
Wasn't there a US Navy sailor that died of a mysterious immune deficiency disease in the 1950's? Seems like I read somewhere that they preserved this guy's tissue samples in paraffin and it was later studied and shown to contain a strain of HIV.
That there was a sailor with AIDS in Manchester, England in 1959, and an HIV+ black kid in St. Louis in 1969, has been known for twenty years.
The primary method of transmission is unprotected anal sex. It could only become an epidemic after the bathhouses and other venues allowed lots of gay men to have lots of anal sex with a wide variety of other gay men
Michael Gottlieb's paper in the December, 1981 New England Journal of Medicine clearly described a new disease. His detailed description of the five patients was so comprehensive and clear that if the paper was the only thing you ever read on the subject, you could pick out an AIDS patient on the street anywhere in the world, today.
In 1970-79, there was an average of 1-3 patients/year admitted to the Mama Yemo hospital in Kinshasa with cryptococcal meningitis. In 1980 and afterward, there were more than one hundred/year. Clearly, the staff there were seeing something new, as well.
At the First International AIDS Conference in Atlanta, in 1986, the Russians presented the first two cases from the former USSR. By 1990, there were tens of thousands.
As late as 1990, scientists from India were promoting the ideas that genetic resistance and/or superior virtue presented an impenetrable barrier to AIDS on the subcontinent. There are now more cases there than anywhere else in the world.
Haitian physicians started seeing cases of Kaposi's Sarcoma in 1978-79, and not before. GHESKIO (Le Groupe Haïtien d'Etude du Sarcome de Kaposi et des Infections Opportunistes) was started by a colleague of mine in 1982 in response to a dramatic upsurge in KS and cryptococcal meningitis,both previously unknown in Haiti.
bet that number is way larger than the average heterosexual
Ya think?
“There is some thought (and scientific evidence to support same) that AIDS actually showed up in the US in 1954, though it was not recognized until June 5, 1981.”
That statement does not surprise me.
“HIV has been detected in preserved historical blood samples as far back as *1959*.”
Yes, I too read that several years ago.
No research went into this article. It is all invention.
“The last genetic studies I remember reading traced HIV back to 1939 or thereabouts in Africa. But that date comes from assuming constant mutation rates, which is not always a valid assumption.”
That’s interesting. Thank you.
“It could only become an epidemic “
I don’t think it ever reached a real epidemic, based on numbers alone.
But yeah, once the social norms of the carriers allowed a large enough matrix of transmission, the “problem” became visible.
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