Why doesn't anyone believe that HIV is manmade?

[tomndebb]

Having said that, the considerations of AIDS as a weapon are untenable. It cannot be aimed; it is not controllable. (It got into everyone’s blood supply.) Once it has been turned loose on the world, no one can control where it might go. It is the same reason that countries gave up using gas in warfare. Nations are certainly not more ethical or noble than they were in 1918, but it is impossible to tell what vagary of weather will send gas back on the gas using troops. No one wants to shoot a gun that has as good a chance as hitting the shooter as the target, and there is nothing in HIV that makes it inherently safer for white heterosexuals than for anyone else.

[light_strand]

Let me count the inaccuracies:

1. HIV is not terribly mutative. It is however a retrovirus, which makes it rather an odd-ball in the viral world. This retroviral activity and the fact that it can not really be effectively be treated make it difficult to develop a vaccine. No pharmaceutical company really wants to tackle the issue because they are afraid of what might happen if the accidentally infect millions of people with an incurable (and horribly expensive to treat) disease.

2. It really didn’t pop out of nowhere. By this definition, Hantavirus popped out of nowhere too. Just because you can’t define why folks died, doesn’t mean that the causative agent is a new comer. HIV does not lend itself well to detection. People don’t die straight away and don’t die from the infection itself. They die from the secondary infections that their bodies can no longer fight off because their immune systems are decimated by the virus. However, the virus itself does not kill the victim. Thus you can see why it may have taken decades for this to spread to the point to where someone noticed, and gave it a name. The CDC keeps track of folks who die of unknown causes just for this reason.

3. Blacks were never much infected when the first outbreaks occurred. It was for a long time considered a “white/gay” disease. This still seems to be the prevailing thought in some black communities, thus their infection rate is on the rise. The same thing happened with women for a while.

4. It would nearly be impossible to target a specific continent for elimination by a virus. Think about it. You would have to make sure that the governments of those countries wouldn’t educate the populace, that the populace would continue to practice the risky behavior, and that there wouldn’t be a treatment until you’d achieved you goal of killing off an entire continent without having it spread to your own (which is one of the reasons biological weapons aren’t too popular).

5. Lastly, the technology simply didn’t exist at the time. Hell taq polymerase wasn’t even developed until the late 1980s which meant that you couldn’t even have run a PCR!
   And there my friend is why that theory is bullshit.

[wevets]

*Originally posted by Laughing Lagomorph *
While I agree that HIV could not have been engineered, there are such things as man-made viruses…They are not made “from the ground up”, of course, but are usually put together using recombinant DNA technology from parts of other viruses, plus whatever gene sequences you are interested in expressing in the target organism.

You are, of course, correct. I’m sorry if I made it sound like people have never manipulated pre-existing viruses (I thought the qualifier I put at the end of my post had clarified that, but I guess I was too vague).

Gene therapy using modified viruses has been around since 1990 (Access excellence’s biotechnology timeline, The DNA Files), but to date no one has manufactured or built a virus on their own; that’s what I meant to say.

[Laughing_Lagomorph]

Not to worry, serack. I just didn’t want someone jumping in and saying “Ah, but scientists have made viruses! You must be in on the conspiracy!”

[Laughing_Lagomorph]

My last post was in reply to wevets, of course, not serack. Sorry about that.
Maybe I should just go to bed. Night all.

[Bricker]

*Originally posted by Triskadecamus *
From “The origin of AIDS” by Tom Curtis"

Gallo discussed the case of a Norwegian seaman who visited an east African coastal city in the mid-Sixties, became sick with an AIDS-like illness in 1966 and died in 1976 at age thirty after infecting his wife and a daughter, who died shortly thereafter. The family’s blood-serum specimens were tested in the mid-Eighties and were positive for HIV.

Other cases from earlier reports cannot be verified since tissue samples are not available.

[hijack]
Hmm. Any theory of how this man would have infected his daughter?
[/hijack]

• Rick

[andros]

Err . . . blood donation? Mosquito? Fairies?

[tomndebb]

He died at age 30 in 1976. He ostensibly contracted the virus in 1966 (at age 20). My guess would be that he simply maried after age 20, passed the virus to his wife during sex, and she passed it on to their daughter in utero. (Just a WAG, of course.)

[Dr.Lao]

*Originally posted by bio-brat *
1. HIV is not terribly mutative. It is however a retrovirus, which makes it rather an odd-ball in the viral world. This retroviral activity and the fact that it can not really be effectively be treated make it difficult to develop a vaccine.

I thought that HIV was highly mutative because it is a retrovirus. Reverse transcriptase lacks certain proofreading subunits that DNA polymerase enjoys and therefore mistakes appear much more frequently. From http://www.bimcore.emory.edu/home/Kins/CHEM441/Gabe/rt/text.html

IV. Mutations of Reverse Transcriptase

 HIV I reverse transcriptase is extremely tolerant of non-standard base pairs and modified ribose units. This leads to an extremely high rate of mutation on the HIV genome. This is compounded by the fact that reverse transcriptase has no exonuclease capability, and hence no way to "proofread" strands of nucleotides as they are being produced. The rate of mistakes averages about 1/1700 to 1/4000 bases, but evidence points that reverse transcriptase is selectively unfaithful, as some bases in the genome have error rates as high as 1/30 bases! (3) One estimate suggests that about 10 bases change in the HIV genome per replication cycle! This high rate of mutation is the major obstacle in the search for a truly effictive wonder drug or vaccine to combat HIV, as resistant strains of the virus evolve rapidly.

[edwino]

Dr. Lao and biobrat:
I have always learned the answer is somewhere in the middle. There are only 3 serotypes of HIV that are able to viable enough to infect a person. This means that HIV isn’t changing much out there. Reverse transcriptase is indeed horribly error-prone, however, which is why drug resistance is a problem and the efficacy of a vaccine is in doubt.

Once HIV establishes an infection, it has a lot more leniency for mutation – the viable virus has already established an infection which will never go away as long as a small percentage of daughter viruses are also viable for reinfection. The rest can have all nature of mutations. If you were to detect the number of serotypes from an infected individual’s blood, IIRC you can find hundreds of differents of types of HIV.

This is why the drug regimen is so stringent and three-fold redundant. Any drug holiday will give viruses which have mutated to be less suscpetible to the three drug cocktail a chance to grow. Drug resistance is common, even with complete drug compliance.

It also gives issues for vaccine construction. A typical way to construct a vaccine is to infect with an attenuated (incapacitated) virus, to which body can then respond, develop antibodies, and kick out. Making an attenuated HIV is not desirable due to its mutation rate. IIRC computer modeling showed that an attenuated HIV with 40 amino acids chopped off of the polymerase was able to mutate back into a functioning HIV within a few years. Scary.