Could it be that HIV has been a plague of man for ages but because of the way it results in other illness and never really presents itself, it’s only recently with technology that we’ve been able to identify the true probem? I was recently reading the wiki entry about black death, and it mentions that a small percent of Europeans are immune to black death, smallpox and HIV… got me thinking it’s strange they should be immune to a virus that never existed?
Possible but unlikely. The vast majority of those with HIV infections succumb to the group of diseases called AIDS within about 10 years. Assuming sexual maturity at 12 (not unusual for large parts of Africa today and not uncommon for large parts of the world pre-1900s) would mean the vast majority of infected people would start dying off very quickly into their 20s. HIV infections run something close to 90% of those who have unsafe sex with HIV carriers, so I would say the fact that anyone is left alive from those times indicates it’s probably not very likely.
Also, the diseases that make up AIDS as a syndrome are pretty specific. The thing that drew researchers attention to delve into what was causing AIDS was people dying from things they never normally died from, like herpes, feline leukemia, and Kaposi’s Sarcoma - people without AIDS get these diseases as well but they rarely if ever die from them because a healthy immune system can keep them in check for a long time or in the case of Herpes for life.
I would question this pretty strongly. Sure, there are always going to be people who just don’t get diseases, but all of my understanding is that HIV has something like a 90% infection rate, depending only on the viral load one is exposed to, versus smallpox (60%) and the black death (30%).
But hopefully you’re not one of those who actually believes HIV is not a virus, are you? Because that would be a silly thing to believe. AIDSTruth.org | The scientific evidence for HIV/AIDS has some good info debunking the denial of HIV as a virus or causing AIDS. I would suggest you read that.
You may doubt it if you wish, but the actual mechanism by which this works has been identified. A significant (although not overwhelmingly high) number of descendants of people who recovered from the Black Death, or who never caught it despite massive exposure (from, say, hauling away corpses and burying them) carrying a gene that codes for a slightly different cell structure on some immune cells. This small difference makes it much harder for the Y. pestis to get a foothold in the body. As it happens, the same charcateristic also makes it much harder for HIV to enter the cell. There is a theory that people who carry one such gene are long-term survivors - they’ll have the virus in their blood, but it takes them a LOT longer to get ill and die from it, and it seems some never will although they could pass it on to someone else. Those with two copies are immune to HIV - they can not be infected, they do not become ill, and the virus does not survive in their bodies no matter how much of the virus they are exposed to.
Cite please? I am very interested in this, as it goes contrary to what I understand about HIV infection. My understanding is that HIV infection is purely a function of virus load - you expose anyone to enough of the virus they get it, no matter what. The saving grace is that most people, in standard infection situations, don’t get exposed to enough HIV (i.e. during unprotected sex, sharing needles, etc…) to necessarily get infected in a single instance but that risky behavior is almost dead-certain to get someone infected because they’re exposed to enough virus load to get infected over time.
ETA: not being snarky, really really not - on review it seemed that my words could be taken that way. I am honestly very curious about this information and would love a cite. My google-fu is just not all that good anymore.
A long time ago I saw a television programme on the BBC - Panorama? - about some sort of historical evidence of a pandemic AIDS infection in (I think) Scotland.
They had dug up a 2,000(?) year old burial site or somesuch and found bones which suggested that the owners had been suffering from the advanced stages of AIDS or some other supposedly modern immune disease.
Never heard anything else about it, though.
Maybe I don’t understand AIDS as much as I thought I did, but how could you tell if someone died from it forensically? Doesn’t it just make it easier for other diseases (TB, etc) to kill you?
You are immune to the uncountable majority of viruses floating around by virtue of they not being adapted to exploit human physiology. The real question is why the two known species of HIV (HIV-1 and HIV-2) are so well adapted to Homo sapiens that they can invade and exist passively in a human organism for years, replicating and dispersing. The operating theory is that HIV-1 developed in chimpanzees (most likely a population in Cameroon) and was hosted in one or more related primate species before being transmitted to humans. They appear to be strains derived from SIV (simian immunodeficiency virus), strains of which are common in different species and general benevolent in their host species although displaying varying degrees of virulence in other species in which it can host.
The earliest verified case of HIV infection in humans is from a Congolese man in 1959. How he was infected and whether he passed on the infection to others, and indeed, whether he ever developed symptoms of AIDS is unknown. It is certainly possible that HIV infected human populations before, but it was probably not widespread owing to the limited transmissability of the virus and the inaccessibility of the locales where it originated. AIDS does have some characteristic illnesses associated with the particular mechanics of immunodeficiency it invokes (which is what allowed doctors to identify it as a specific pathology rather than the amorphous “Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Disease” syndrome that it started out as, and we haven’t seen any mass plagues of Kaposi’s sarcoma or Pneumocystis pneumonia.
There are certainly populations resistant to smallpox in Eurasia; that is, the immune system creates antibodies that completely eliminates the variola virus from the body. Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes the bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic plagues (widely but not universally thought to be the cause of the European medieval plagues) can sometimes host in semi-dormancy in human hosts, but there is no permanent resistance or immunity per se, and mortality rates are pretty consistent among populations. (There are several hypotheses that the Black Death may be one or more different illnesses based upon distinctions between the effects of the plague and historical accounts of Black Death victims.)
There is no verified immunity to either major strain of HIV, although it has been shown to co-exist in some asymptomatic hosts for over a decade, and there are a few cases of previously established infection where later sampling has shown an undetectable level of the virus. This may be due to some kind of native immunity, or an acquired resistant by as yet unknown mechanism, or just minor variations on known strains (particularly HIV-2) which are able to exist in human hosts without the accompanying normal pathological effects of the syndrome.
Stranger
For how long?
Certainly a single sex act with someone HIV positive doesn’t have a 90% infection rate. The 90% infection rate I’ve seen is for blood transfusions. All the statistics I’ve seen are around 10-20% annual transmission rate for unprotected sex. Not a picnic, but it would take years of unprotected sex to approach 90% infection rate.
Actually, transmission occurs in something like 0.2% of intercourse acts between an HIV carrier and non-carrier. I guess you were talking about something like, “if you bang HIV-infected hos every weekend,” but let us be more precise about what we mean.
I have no knowledge of how diseases spread through populations, but 0.2% rate doesn’t seem too unreasonable on the face of it to put a disease on the slow burner (especially if we’re dealing with more or less monogamous populations).
But I guess the answer to that question would still be no, because an HIV plague would have characteristics we could recognize today and probably wouldn’t even stop once started?
Black Death immunity = AIDS immunity
If you don’t want to slog through a long medical study there’s a one-hour PBS episode from the series “Secrets of the Dead” that is very approachable.
The episode is from 2002
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/case_plague/clues.html
Description:
When the Black Plaque bacterium ravaged Europe, not everyone who came in contact with it died. Geneticist Steven O’Brien investigates why some survived by visiting a small English town struck by plague in 1665.
Historical records, town archives, and modern forensic techniques construct a medical case study with startling implications: survivors carried a genetic mutation that made them immune to plague–and their descendants immune to AIDS.
Wait. You’re arguing that there *is * a connection between plague immunity and HIV immunity, right?
Cite 1
Cite 2
Neither Cite 3 nor Cite 4 say anything relevant.
There is no connection between the black death and HIV resistance, according to your own cites.
The connection is simply that there exists a single mutation, CCR5-{Delta}32, that confers resistance to both HIV and the plague. The plague is just hypothesized as a strong selection event for this mutation. The only reason that the mutation gives resistance to both pathogens is that, by some happenstance, they share targets for infection.
I thought I read that AIDS was first found, in the tissues of a man who died in 1957. It probably was limited to a small area, untill it broke out in the 1970’s.
There is no known infection rate, we do not infect humans with HIV, so that at best is a guest. The stats are too wild to make sense and we don’t perform double blind tests so the results are not accurate. Animal infectin rates are not analogus to people.
I did a lot of research papers on this and the fact is the only positve direct link we get for HIV is the late 50s.
Remember the story of the sailor from the 50s and the African American teen in St Louis from the late 60s were later proved false though they are still all over the Internet.
There is some evidence of an AIDS like disease going back to the early 1900s but nothing concrete. Explorers have documented this disease but no one knows if it was AIDS or muted into AIDS or something all together different.
Is AIDS new or undiscovered? Who knows, we didn’t know anything of Marburg till the 60s and it’s cousin Ebola was far more common (that is just in comparison with Marburg both are rare), then all of a sudden in the late 90s, Marburg took off.
Remember Africa is a reverse place. Unlike the Americas where the Europeans came and brought disease with them, in Africa when the Europeans settled it was the Europeans that were hit by disease not the other way around.
Africa is such a hard place to do research only guesses can be made. For example Malaria which has always been endemic to Africa (south of the Sahara) used to irritate not kill Africans, since the 60s the death rate from Malaria in sub-Sahara has become overwhelming. Now 1 in 5 African children under 4 dies from it. It’s still unclear since this Malaria rate is far more overwhelming in the urban area, is it the urban Africans are losing immunity protection or the Malaria is mutating.
Bottom line we have far too many examples of new disease to make HIV any less special. I mean who has asked this quesiton of Ebola or Marburg? And there are many others.
I’ve seen that documentary and it doesn’t quite live up to its claims. First of all they focus on an outbreak of plague that happened 300+ years after the Black Death, which is the plague that ravaged Europe. Subsequent plague outbreaks did not have the same symptoms or morality rate as the Black Death. Accepting that Y. Pestis probably caused the Black Death, there may well have been other factors at work that caused the unprecedented outbreak. Some people think that the huge famine of the early 1300’s made those people uniquely susceptible to plague. Second, the woman who supposedly had the immunity survived the plague unscathed, but ALL of her kids died. She had a lot too; 6 or so if I remember. Wouldn’t the odds dictate that she had passed on the immunity to at least one of them?
I thought that RNA from different strains of a virus could be compared to determine the time since they split from a common source. I seem to remember that HIV is pretty young, and that Hepatitis B and C are pretty old.
Wait, they were debunked? When?
“…comparative sequence analysis of the [HIV] viral genomes or parts thereof … conclud[es] that the present form of AIDS is probably not older than 50-100 years.”
Fractals in Biology and Medicine
Theo F. Nonnenmacher, Gabriele A. Losa, Danilo Merlini, Ewald R. Weibel
Springer, 1994
I don’t know if it’s been modeled since then.