
An HIV Genome from Two Decades Before Its Discovery - gataca
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/hiv-genome-two-decades-before-its-discovery/596272/
======
ajna91
In the book "The Origin of Aids", Dr. Jacques Pépin analyzes the literature on
the disease and comes up with a stunning timeline for how the disease spread.
Quoting from a nytimes review article[1]

>Dr. Pépin calculates that, in the early 1920s, a maximum of 1,350 hunters
might have had blood-to-blood contact with troglodytes chimps. Only 6 percent
of the chimps — about 80 — would have been infected, and fewer than 4 percent
of the scratched hunters probably could have caught it. That would suggest
only three infected hunters at most.

> Given how inefficient most sexual spread is — in some cases, a husband and
> wife can have sex for months without passing H.I.V. — sex alone would not
> have let three hunters, or even a dozen, pass on their virus to today’s
> millions, he argues. There must have been an amplifier.

> In the 1920s, machine-made glass syringes replaced expensive hand-blown
> ones, and the Belgians and French attacked many diseases in their colonies,
> both out of paternalism and to create herd immunity to protect whites.
> Patients might get up to 300 shots in a lifetime. Other diseases have spread
> this way; an Egyptian campaign against schistosomiasis ended in 1980 after
> giving more than half its “beneficiaries” hepatitis C.

> And, in one of his own studies of elderly Africans, Dr. Pépin was told that
> many of those injected against sleeping sickness in the 1940s had died in
> the 1950s. Since many of the survivors were infected with HTLV, another
> chimp virus, he surmised that their long-dead friends might have been among
> the first victims of AIDS.

> Haiti’s epidemic, like that of North America and Western Europe, is nearly
> all subgroup B. But subgroup B is so rare in central Africa that it causes
> less than 1 percent of cases.

> That suggests AIDS crossed the Atlantic in just one Haitian. Molecular clock
> dating indicates it reached Haiti roughly in 1966.

[1]
[https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/health/18aids.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/health/18aids.html)

