The Path of AIDS

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YMix
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The Path of AIDS

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Fascinating article.
In nature, only about 6 percent of troglodytes chimps are ever infected. Within a troop, each female mates with many males, but mating with outsiders is rare, so most troops are untouched while a few are heavily infected.

H.I.V.-1’s four genetic groups, M, N, O and P, show that it made the chimp-human jump at least four times in history. But group M accounts for more than 99 percent of all cases.

Why did only one spread?

Molecular clock dating shows that M reached humans somewhere near 1921. Chimpanzees are too big and agile to be hunted with anything but guns, which until the 20th century were almost entirely in white hands.

Using colonial census data, surveys of how modern bush-meat hunters butcher kills, and infection rates among nurses stuck by dirty needles, 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.

Studies among heroin addicts — he cites examples from Italy, New York, Edinburgh and Bangkok — show that blood transmission is 10 times as efficient.

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.
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Azrael
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Re: The Path of AIDS

Post by Azrael »

I guess it's true -- no good deed goes unpunished.
cultivate a white rose
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