HIV AIDS

History of HIV/AIDS

by Wikipedia

AIDS is caused by a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which originated in non-human primates in Central and West Africa. While various sub-groups of the virus acquired human infectivity at different times, the present pandemic had its origins in the emergence of one specific strain – HIV-1 subgroup M – in Léopoldville in the Belgian Congo (now Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in the 1920s.

There are two types of HIV: HIV-1 and HIV-2. HIV-1 is more virulent, more easily transmitted, and the cause of the vast majority of HIV infections globally. The pandemic strain of HIV-1 is closely related to a virus found in chimpanzees of the subspecies Pan troglodytes troglodytes, which live in the forests of the Central African nations of Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, the Republic of the Congo, and the Central African Republic. HIV-2 is less transmissible and is largely confined to West Africa, along with its closest relative, a virus of the sooty mangabey (Cercocebus atys atys), an Old World monkey inhabiting southern Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and western Ivory Coast.

HIV Origin Story

by Zoltan Fehervari 11/18/2018 Nature

More recent molecular timing and modeling studies have pushed back the earliest appearance of M group HIV-1 to around the beginning of the twentieth century. This would suggest that HIV-1 was circulating cryptically in Africa for generations before factors such as urbanization and mass movement of people propelled it onto the global stage. 
AIDS was first described as a new disease in 1981 (MILESTONE 1), and the causative lentivirus that came to be known as HIV-1 was identified a couple of years later (MILESTONE 2). However, the origins of HIV-1 and the reasons for its explosive appearance and rapid transformation into a global epidemic remained a mystery.
The inklings of an answer began to emerge from two West African patients presenting with an antigenically distinct AIDS-causing virus that subsequently came to be known as HIV-2 (MILESTONE 6). Genetically distant from HIV-1, HIV-2 was instead shown to be closely related to a lentivirus infecting an African monkey—the sooty mangabey. Subsequent studies confirmed that lentiviruses are endemic to many species of African monkeys and some apes—and these have collectively become known as simian immunodeficiency viruses (SIVs). Sooty mangabeys in particular were found to be naturally infected with a lentivirus known as SIVsmm (with the subscript indicating the name of the infected species), and genetic evidence showed that this virus was transmitted to humans, generating the HIV-2 epidemic.

HIV before the Age of AIDS

by Mary Carmichael FRONTLINE

As soon as HIV was identified in 1983, scientists started trying to understand where it had come from, when it had arisen, and why it had spread. Were they too late? To answer most of their questions, they would have had to witness the virus's evolution. Scientists can track new pathogens such as SARS and avian flu because they produce obvious symptoms almost immediately. But HIV is a stealth virus that takes as many as 10 years to present symptoms; by the time researchers knew enough to wonder about its origins, those origins were in the distant past.

Aids: Origin of pandemic 'was 1920s Kinshasa'

by BBC

An international team of scientists say a "perfect storm" of population growth, sex and railways allowed HIV to spread.

The Origin of AIDS

by All Things Considered 15/7/200 npr

NPR's Richard Knox reports from Durban, South Africa on a little-noticed study at this year's AIDS Conference. It found that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV, is older than anyone suspected.

Researchers Clear 'Patient Zero' From AIDS Origin Story

[https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/10/26/498876985/mystery-solved-how-hiv-came-to-the-u-s by Michaeleen Doucleff 26/10/16 npr]

By genetically sequencing samples from people infected early on, scientists say they have figured out when and where the virus that took hold here first arrived. In the process, they have exonerated the man accused of triggering the epidemic in North America.

Study pushes back origin of AIDS pandemic to 1908

by Julie Steenhuysen 1/10/08 Reuters

CHICAGO, Oct 1 (Reuters) - The deadly AIDS virus first began spreading among humans at the turn of the 20th century in sub-Saharan Africa, just as modern cities were emerging in the region, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.

Origin of AIDS Linked to Colonial Practices in Africa

by Richard Knox 4/6/06 npr

Monday marks the 25th anniversary of the first report of AIDS. But only recently have scientists come to conclusions about where HIV came from. The current thinking is that the colonial horrors of mid-20th-century Africa allowed the virus to jump from chimpanzees to humans and become established in human populations around 1930.

New Evidence Shows HIV's Spread Got Earlier Start

by Richard Knox 1/10/08 npr

The new evidence lay in a box in a musty storage room at the University of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. "It looked like it had been gathering dust since the 1960s," says Dr. Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, an author of a new report on the origins of HIV in the Oct. 2 issue of the British journal Nature.

AIDS, 1981: Mystery of an Emerging Epidemic

by Brenda Wilson 5/6/06 npr

In 1981, most Americans were oblivious to an emerging sickness that was overtaking gays. Throughout the spring and summer that year, a mystery would slowly unfold in U.S. metropolitan areas. It was the beginning of an epidemic of biblical proportions that has left no part of the world untouched.

Multimedia Feature An AIDS timeline, a look at the disease by the numbers, plus a narrated slideshow profiling how the disease has affected people around the world.

Trains ‘transported’ HIV across the world

by AFP 3/10/14 ALJAZEERA

The virus causing AIDS was assisted by train transport and the sex trade, facilitating its spread from the city of Kinsasha to the rest of the continent and eventually around the world, infecting some 75 million people.

=====https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/polio-vaccine-trials-are-ruled-out-as-origin-of-aids- 1559242.html===== by Steve Connor 24/10/1992 INDEPENDENT

The allegations, which surfaced in the Lancet and Rolling Stone magazine in March, centre on the relationship between the simian Aids virus, SIV, found to infect a high proportion of African green monkeys, and the human Aids virus, HIV. Many scientists believe HIV evolved from SIV by crossing from monkey to man.

HIV's Family Tree

by FRONTLINE

There are two forms of human AIDS virus, human immunodeficiency virus types 1 and 2 (HIV-1 and HIV-2). Related simian immunodeficiency viruses (SIVs) are found in more than 30 species of primates in sub-Saharan Africa; each species has its own form of SIV. HIV-1 is classified into three groups, M, N and O. HIV-2 is also classified into multiple groups, but only groups A and B have been found in more than one person.

‘Tinderbox’: How Colonialism Shaped the HIV/AIDS Epidemic

by JEFFREY BROWN 10/4/12 PBS NEWS

Ray Suarez speaks with authors Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin about how "shadows of colonialism" hang over the spread of HIV from Africa. The topic is explored in their book "Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome it."

THE AGE OF AIDS

by FRONTLINE

In the second year that I was teaching school in the Congo, two Haitians came to our school under contract from the Congolese government to teach. It turns out they were part of a large population, relatively large. No one knows exactly how many, but somewhere between probably 5,000 and 10,000 Haitians came over to the Congo to help fill needs that were brought on by independence, when most of the Belgians left. There were ... very few Congolese schoolteachers, lawyers, doctors, other professionals who normally would have helped to run the country, so they had this contract with the Haitian government to send people over to help fill these gaps. Two of those teachers came to teach in our primary school.

Robert Fullilove: Inside the “Two Worlds of AIDS” in America

by Jason M. Breslow 10/7/12 FRONTLINE

Robert Fullilove is a professor of clinical sociomedical studies at Columbia University. He tells FRONTLINE that the fight against HIV/AIDS, particularly in the black community, has been made harder “because the majority of Americans no longer see HIV/AIDS as a problem.” The nation should care more, Fullilove says, “because you don’t want people cut down in the flower of youth by a debilitating condition that costs us so much money.” This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted on May 6, 2011.

Search for a Vaccine

by NOVA

The U.S. government alone spends $200 million a year on a hunt for a vaccine against AIDS. At the forefront of that search stands Dr. David Baltimore, chairman of the National Institute of Health's AIDS Vaccine Research Committee. Currently president of the California Institute of Technology as well, Baltimore won the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Betsey Arledge, producer of the NOVA film "Surviving AIDS," interviewed a cautiously optimistic Baltimore on the current state of the search for a vaccine.

Origin story

by Zoltan Fehervari 28/11/18 nature portfolio

AIDS was first described as a new disease in 1981 (MILESTONE 1), and the causative lentivirus that came to be known as HIV-1 was identified a couple of years later (MILESTONE 2). However, the origins of HIV-1 and the reasons for its explosive appearance and rapid transformation into a global epidemic remained a mystery.

Tracing the origin and history of the HIV-2 epidemic

by Philippe Lemey, Oliver G. Pybus, Bin Wang, +2 , and Anne-Mieke Vandamme 12/5/03 PNAS

In this study we date the introduction of HIV-2 into the human population and estimate the epidemic history of HIV-2 subtype A in Guinea-Bissau, the putative geographic origin of HIV-2. The evolutionary history of the simian immunodeficiency virussooty mangabey/HIV-2 lineage was reconstructed by using available database sequences with known sampling dates, and a timescale for this history was calculated by using maximum likelihood methods.

Gene Loss and Adaptation to Hominids Underlie the Ancient Origin of HIV-1

by Lucie Etienne 17/7/13 ScienceDirect

HIV-1 resulted from cross-species transmission of SIVcpz, a simian immunodeficiency virus that naturally infects chimpanzees. SIVcpz, in turn, is a recombinant between two SIV lineages from Old World monkeys. Lentiviral interspecies transmissions are partly driven by the evolution and capacity of viral accessory genes, such as vpx, vpr, and vif, to antagonize host antiviral factors, such as SAMHD1 and the APOBEC3 proteins. We show that vpx, which in other lentiviruses antagonizes SAMHD1, was deleted during the creation of SIVcpz.