I’m always told it started in the 80’s. I think it got a name in the 1980’s and has been around since ancient times it’s just that nobody knew what the heck it was. I thought about this today in class when the teacher mentioned something about prostitutes in ancient times and I said “what about AIDS?” and he looks at me and says AIDS didn’t exist, eventhough I know it did. AIDS couldn’t have just sprung up in the 1980’s. My question is what was AIDS called before?
I think maybe it’s that there was no verifiable proof that AIDS was in the human population before the 80’s. Isn’t it in the primate population as well? Didn’t they prove this? I might not be recalling correctly.
Here is a site that gives a concise overview of the early cases of AIDS. There’s a LOT more out there, but be careful: many sites are highly disreputable. Best to stick with university sites, NIH, etc.
Regarding the possible role of polio vaccine as a source for HIV, I think recent research disproves it once and for all.
The individual viral strains that cause AIDS in humans are fairly well proven to have existed throughout the last sixty years, in human, and perhaps in humans outside of rural Africa. Some less convincing evidence shows possible human infections going back a hundred years. The genetic data are consistent with long term (millennia) reservoirs of Simian Immunodeficiency Virus species in numerous populations of chimpanzees, and bonobos, but prior to the 1950’s records in those regions are incomplete to the point of nonexistence. Speculations on exact dates of zoonotic transfer are just that: speculation.
The exact progression from extremely rare, to beginning epidemic is much less clear than it was thought to be in the 1990’s. The demographics of both infection, and medical investigation were so highly politicized during the early years of the epidemic that it has become almost impossible to define just when and how the major reservoirs within Africa, and subsequent infection routes into the rest of the world happened. By 1980, the disease was no longer a single focus expansion, and yet, the original research was strongly affected by the political desire to find a geographical source.
At this late date it is only possible to state that the disease almost certainly began its spread in western Africa, probably some time in the first half of the twentieth century. It was spread by military, and economic driven human vectors to Asia, and North America and Europe by 1975. After that, the spread has been from many foci, and multiple strains infect some victim in all parts of the world.
Sexual transmission remains the overwhelming majority of all sources of infection.
Tris
You say you know AIDS existed “in ancient times”. On what do you base this knowledge?
Tris where did you get the info for the fisrt paragraph. It’s not that I don’t believe you, I’d just like to know more about that.
Also, in Richard Prestons “The Hot Zone”, he credits the initial massive spread of AIDS to the paving of the Kinshasa Highway, a coast to coast highway that runs east to west across Africa. (Prostitution not being controlled, and springing up abundantly at truck stops along the way.) I assume that this is one of the things that was disproved from the 90’s? If so, how, and where did the idea come about that it started its spread in the early 20th century.
And I’ll be the one to ask… so now do we know whether or not it came into being due to sex with a monkey? I know that was touted for a long time, and I’m curious if that was one of the things to come out because of how politicised the spread of AIDS became.
If this is a hijack, then please answer in another thread. Thanks
I think I read in a National Geographic sometime in the 90s of a medical report done on a man who came down with an undiagnosed illness characterised by dark lesions on the skin and depressed immune response…in Africa in the 1950s.
A blood or tissue sample was taken and preserved: when they tracked down the sample and ran the AIDS test, it came back HIV+.
Common sense dude…diseases don’t just appear out of thin air…how do you know it didn’t exist in ancient times?
Well, I don’t have specific cites.
I tend to read almost everything published in Science magazine about AIDS Then I follow references and links from there to the on line sources, such as JAMA, CDC and the various reports from researchers referenced from them. WHO news releases also have led me to fairly reliable reports of what follow up research has found out about such things as early AIDS cases in New Orleans, and Germany. (What they said is that we can’t tell now, and probably could not have been sure even if we had tissues.)
The diversity of DNA in the known HIV positive population is not consistent with a single zoonosis event, or even several such events within fifty years of the current date. The increase in commerce and travel into western Africa certainly played a significant part in the spread of the disease, but the highway construction was not the only, or first route for vectors carrying AIDS. By order of magnitude it and the military movements during the fifties and sixties were certainly major vector sources. It is also true that DNA diversity does not readily support long term (millennial) reservoirs in humans. So, it is a modern disease, but not as modern as some think.
By the way, slaughter and consumption of Chimpanzees provide sufficient vector opportunities to allow a zoonosis event without anyone having sex with a monkey. Commerce in Chimp meat was common in rural Gabon, and nearby countries. Folks bitten by Chimps while attempting to have sex with them seem more likely candidates for infection to me, but I am rather naïve.
Tris
This page mentions the first known cases of HIV/AIDS, including the guy from 1959. If I may quote:
One might suppose that the virus had crossed over into the human population, decades ago, but that the social and political climates weren’t “right” for it to become so widespread until around the 70s. (With all the drug use, sex, globalization, etc.)
Basic stuff on diseases, layperson to layperson:
New diseases are constantly being transferred from animals to humans, which is thought to be the case with AIDS - see Tris’s posts. I believe SARS was meant to have followed this pattern
‘Old’ diseases are always evolving and becoming more virulent. Some of the most dangerous diseases today are, in a way, dangerous because they are new. The human immune hasn’t had a chance to adapt to them yet.
Therefore, to most average people, diseases do seem to “appear out of thin air”.
The 70’s was decades ago.
Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Thanks for the link and the info from Tris and Ranchoth Interesting to imagine crossovers that died out before they got off the ground. That is supposedly what kept ebola from killing the world thus far. It would burn through a villiage so fast that it never had a chance to get outside the villiage. (That, and the practice in African villiages to block all roads in and out when an epidemic of whatever struck them.) I never would have thought to apply that to AIDS or HIV, because we now think of such a long possible life for those who get it.
No idea what it was called , but I always equated it with the Boy in the Bubble, who had to be in an isolated inviroment cause he had no immunitys.
Declan
Yes they do. What seems common sense to you ain’t always sense.
Put it this way; if diseases don’t appear “from nowhere” (actually by mutation from other diseases), why do the entire medical establishment believe AIDs and SARS (for instance) did? Aren’t they, in general, likely to have a better handle on this than you?
Huh? AIDS is entirely different from “bubble boy”. Children who have to be isolated like that suffer from SCID (severe combined immune deficiency), a genetic defect that results in the lack of a functional immune system. Without treatment (isolation, some experimental cases of gene therapy) any child with SCID would die in short order and until relatively recently would just have been another unexplained cause of infant/early childhood death.
AIDS on the other hand, is what its name says - acquired immune deficiency syndrome, in which adults who had been perfectly healthy up to that point have their immune system fail due to HIV infection. At risk of sounding like a broken record, no one with SCID could survive to adulthood without being in germ-free isolation, and that would not have been technically possible until a few decades ago at most.
And as for diseases “appearing out of thin air”…what everybody else has said. Viruses and bacteria can cross from animals to humans to cause new diseases in humans, older pathogens can mutate and perhaps even seem like something that hasn’t been seen before, and so on, and all of these can be much more dangerous than older diseases because not only do people not have any resistance to these newer pathogens, but the pathogens themselves can be more virulent than the older versions.
It didn’t start in the 80s. It’s news to me that there are questions as to the authenticity of the tissue sample from 1959, but the Norwegian sailor discussed above, who contracted the disease in Cameroon around 1962 if I remember right, certainly predates the 80s. He got it from a local woman, indicating that the disease was present in the human population before that.
However, records of disease in Africa in this era and before are obviously nonexistent - so all we can tell for sure is that sometime in the area of 1960, Europeans started getting infected with HIV due to contact with Africans.
There’s a paper, which I can’t find any direct cites to at the moment, that used a method based on estimating the times at with the different strains of the disease diverged. HIV-1M, the group of strains that infect the most people worldwide, probably split off in the 1930s, IIRC. But ultimately, according to these researchers, HIV-1 M, N, and O diverged long before that - around 1675!
I’m at work so I don’t have time to dig up more citations, but I learned about this by digging around Google - you can find more technical information if you look. I can’t speak to how credible this is, because I’m not a scientist, and it’s an extraordinary claim so no doubt a lot of scientists are skeptical, but it’s fascinating nonetheless.
A disease like AIDS, that’s not terribly infectious (since it requires fluid transfer to spread) could well have existed without note for a long period of time. It didn’t kill people right away or in vast numbers all at once, meaning that it might never have been noticed among the population. Many populations were quite isolated, and my understanding is that the mores of African societies in the region discouraged promiscuity and marriage between tribes, so it could easily have been confined to a small area, with a fairly small and stable reservoir of infection among humans.
The fact that there are prostitutes in Kinshasa who’ve survived HIV infection for an extremely long time, longer than any other patients on record (IIRC again), suggests that there may be some immunity in parts of the population to the disease, again indicating that it may have been present for quite a long period of time. Of course, this immunity is clearly not widespread.
Still, even though you can’t make any solid claims as to the appearance of AIDS prior to around 1960, when the first samples we can test today date to, it’s fascinating to think about. AIDS most certainly appeared, in the developing world at least, prior to the 1980s. And infection must have occured during the seventies in big cities in the US and Europe, since the disease appeared around 1981 or so.
Please see my post here for a concise example of why common sense is one of the worst possible tools to rely on in the field of epidemiology. In short, you don’t know nearly as much as you think you do.
The earliest proven case of AIDS (by examining tissue specimens) was in a young white English sailor who died in 1959. The earliest proven case of AIDS in America was in a teenaged black boy in St. Louis who died in 1969.
I’ve heard that AIDS was first transferred from monkeys to humans when humans ate the brain of a diseased monkey.*
Note: I do not have a cite for this. I’m not positive it’s true. It’s just something I heard that might be true.
And, you know, there were other STDs - I’m of the impression that AIDs is just so noticable now because after having sex you don’t die of syhphilis in a few years, (NB: hyperbole) so a disease that has a stupidly long incubation period has a chance to spread well. I think you’re right that being a prostitute was a risky business, but, well, I betting people just sucked it up, so to speak.