“The River” is a fascinating book. However, its premise is wrong and has been debunked. The OTHER parts of the book are good, I have to admit.
Syringes were also a new invention, used by very few people - and one of the inventors became a morphine addict, as did his wife, who is the first documented case of a person who died from injectable drug abuse.
Vaccination could also potentially have spread it; there’s the Bundaberg disaster in prewar Australia, and also a group of soldiers got hepatitis in WWII after being immunized. This was where some of the early anti-vaxers’ ideas came from.
(Sorry about using an abstract; most of the stories about it are behind paywalls.)
Didn’t know until I read this that over 50,000 soldiers got hepatitis from tainted yellow-fever vaccine, something that was also experimental at the time! :eek: I had heard that it was a small outbreak.
It’s claimed that HIV was originally spread to humans by consuming slaughtered primates, but I often wonder if it wasn’t originally spread by bestiality instead. I’m sick I guess :D.
Transmission wasn’t by consumption, but butchering, which may include blood-to-blood contact if the hunter cut himself. Please be aware that “Africans got AIDS when they had sex with monkeys” is considered to be a racist trope. What I tell my students who insist on this story is “Try to have sex with a chimp. Go ahead. Report back if you’re still alive.” Then I show a couple of videos of chimpanzee attacks. Examples:
I head that the bushmeat theory goes back to the 1920s – that some think that’s around the time that SIV* mutated into HIV.
*Simian
That’s what it says in the wiki entry.
I figured out the cut-hunter theory a decade before I read it anywhere.
There are quite a few this persons dropping dead for no reason in medical literature, from the 60’s. Which are now thought off as AIDS.
I read a rather sad story of one street living teenager in the US, I think from St Louis, who came with some mystery illness in the 60’s. The doctor who treated him said that if he knew then what he knew now, he would have identified him as an AIDS sufferer. Although I believe some have dispute that since he had never travelled abroad.
His tissues were never tested.
[quote=“susan, post:44, topic:840840”]
Transmission wasn’t by consumption, but butchering, which may include blood-to-blood contact if the hunter cut himself. Please be aware that “Africans got AIDS when they had sex with monkeys” is considered to be a racist trope. What I tell my students who insist on this story is “Try to have sex with a chimp. Go ahead. Report back if you’re still alive.” Then I show a couple of videos of chimpanzee attacks. Examples:
Chimp Attacks Texas Student: Andrew Oberle Fighting for His Life After 6-Hour Surgery - YouTube
[/QUOTE]Dave Chappelle.
Absolutely!
Some guy out in the bush tranquilizing a chimp and going balls deep wouldn’t be impossible. I’ve read of primates being chained up in brothels and being used sexually. Back in the day (Rome I believe) they would douse a womans vagina with female chimp urine to get the male chimp excited enough to sexually assault them. Who’s to say that patient zero wasn’t a female?
It was very easy to buy glass syringes in the late fifties and early sixties, just in any chemists (pharmacy).
I used to buy them for oiling parts of our miniature railway rolling stock. Needles were available separately.
You read about this. Right.
Can’t remember where I came across it, but I have seen speculation that SIV made the species jump into HIV at the start of the previous century, during Leopold 2s atrocity in Congo.
This Wikipedia article lists the names of several men who contracted unexplained illness in the 1950. It is now thought that they had AIDS. Including one case in 1959 where the virus was identified via preserved samples.
These early cases never reached the critical mass needed for an epidemic. AIDS is not incredibly contagious and these early patients quite possibly may have never infected anyone
Robert Rayford It’s speculated that he may have been a child prostitute. Given his age, he most likely acquired it from being molested as a child. 
One wonders what the person who gave it to him died from, and how it was explained, whether it was through sexual abuse, or even maternal transmission which isn’t impossible.
I recently did a CE about the transmission and treatment of pediatric AIDS, and it said that most new cases in children in the U.S. are from international adoption.
If I remember correctly, mother-to-child (“vertical”) transmission without prevention/intervention is about 25% including vaginal birth and breast feeding.
[Moderating]
You may have gotten this board mixed up with Penthouse Letters. Here’s a hint: It’s not. You are hereby directed to keep your sexual fantasies out of General Questions. I strongly recommend that you also keep them out of other forums here, but that’s up to those moderators.
IIRC, he reported that his grandfather had similar symptoms a few years earlier. Which has led some speculation that Gramps was the abuser although that is conjecture at best.
I have wondered if the timeline of the disease spread was pushed back 30 years, would it have been identified more quickly? These days it pretty much every confounding case in Caracas is shared worldwide by doctors in near Real time. All these cases isolated for over a decade, went by unremarked or published in journals with limited circulation at least compared to modern boards. (The MERS virus was identified within days as the Saudi doctors out its cases history on a public medical board).