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.
“It sounds like the liberals are trying to re-write history again,”
I agree.
On the rear end of a Hudson.
Voodoo curse..
I read a similar article, but it spoke of tetrodotoxin poisoning from a fish, what the Japanese call Fugu.
But AIDS would fit the bill over a long time frame.
that is sadly funny
Ping for later.
Ping for later.
"Shilts concentrates on a few people who were central to the AIDS epidemic. One such person was a Quebecker Airline Steward by the name of Gaetan Dugas, the so-called Patient Zero. Dugas was not the first person to be infected with AIDS (or detected as such). But Dugas was seen as the reason why AIDS was able to spread like wildfire across countries and continents. Calling Dugas promiscuous is an understatement. It is said that he would indulge in several thousand partners from the late 1970s until 1984. When his condition became diagnosed as GRID (Gay Related Immuodeficiency Disease) or more popularly known then as "Gay Cancer" (as AIDS was known as before it became obvious that it was not just a gay disease), Dugas continued to sleep with random partners. He would even visit clubs and after finishing his interludes, would turn the lights up and boast he had passed the cancer onto his partner, ghoulishly exposing his Kaposi Sarcoma lesions and his gaunt face and body. Dugas would eventually become an outcast in the gay community, moving back to Canada where he continued his promiscuity there."
A similar but different view, this article I saw on Drudge mentions a single infected person from Haiti as being the vector into the USA.
He's only known because of the Shilts book.
There were hundreds of men (at least) just like him.
In a quick search I hit 21 'AIDS indicators' in addition to Kaposi's Sarcoma - which itself is not limited only to AIDS/HIV sufferers but appears to have been limited to certain ethnicities not associated with the Caribbean prior to the time frame you indicated.
Seems to me that the immune deficiency probably existed before the "new" cancer arrived to become its hallmark?
It is pathetically ironic that there is on Broadway a revival of Hot-l Baltimore, a 'comedy' from the seventies that is set in a gay men's bath house.
David Livingstone, and successor generations of British colonial doctors, were superb observers. Their 130-year old drawings of various tropical maladies are still used for instruction and diagnosis - that's how good they were, and are.
If AIDS existed in Africa in the colonial period, it would have been well-known.
1969 is an interesting year to declare the start of AIDS for this reason.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots
ooooh, someone had to say it, glad it wasn’t me
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