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Title: AIDS virus invaded U.S. from Haiti: study
Source:
Reuters
URL Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2007 ... aids-usa-idUSN2954500820071029
Published: Oct 29, 2007
Author: Will Dunham
Post Date: 2014-10-05 03:35:54 by X-15
Keywords: AIDS, GRIDS, Africa
Views: 58
Comments: 2
The AIDS virus invaded the United States in about 1969 from Haiti, carried most likely by a single infected immigrant who set the stage for it to sweep the world in a tragic epidemic, scientists said on Monday. Michael Worobey, a University of Arizona evolutionary biologist, said the 1969 U.S. entry date is earlier than some experts had believed. The timeline laid out in the study led by Worobey indicates that HIV infections were occurring in the United States for roughly 12 years before AIDS was first recognized by scientists as a disease in 1981. Many people had died by that point. "It is somehow chilling to know it was probably circulating for so long under our noses," Worobey said in a telephone interview. The researchers conducted a genetic analysis of stored blood samples from early AIDS patients to determine when the human immunodeficiency virus first entered the United States. They found that HIV was brought to Haiti by an infected person from central Africa in about 1966, which matches earlier estimates, and then came to the United States in about 1969. The researchers think an unknown single infected Haitian immigrant arrived in a large city like Miami or New York, and the virus circulated for years -- first in the U.S. population and then to other nations. It can take several years after infection for a person to develop AIDS, a disease that ravages the immune system. DISEASE MULTIPLIES "That one infection would have become two, and then it doubles again and the two becomes four," Worobey said. "So you have a period -- probably a fair number of years -- where you're dealing with probably fewer than a hundred people who are infected. "And then, as with epidemic expansion, at some point the hundred becomes 200, you start getting into thousands, tens of thousands. And then quite rapidly you can be up into the hundreds of thousands of infections that were probably already there before AIDS was recognized in the early 1980s." The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The path the virus traveled as it jumped from nation to nation has long been debated by scientists. The University of Miami's Dr. Arthur Pitchenik, a co-author of the study, had seen Haitian immigrants in Miami as early as 1979 with a mystery illness that turned out to be AIDS. He knew the government long had stored some of their blood samples. The researchers analyzed samples from five of these Haitian immigrants dating from 1982 and 1983. They also looked at genetic data from 117 more early AIDS patients from around the world. This genetic analysis allowed the scientists to calibrate the molecular clock of the strain of HIV that has spread most widely, and calculated when it arrived first in Haiti from Africa and then in the United States. The researchers virtually ruled out the possibility that HIV had come directly to the United States from Africa, setting a 99.8 percent probability that Haiti was the steppingstone. "I think that it gives us more clear insight into the history of it (the AIDS epidemic) and what path the virus took -- and hard objective evidence, not just armchair thinking," Pitchenik said in a telephone interview. Studies suggest the virus first entered the human population in about 1930 in central Africa, probably when people slaughtered infected chimpanzees for meat. AIDS has killed more than 25 million people and about 40 million others are infected with HIV.
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http://www.newsweek.com/2014/08/29/smuggled-bushmeat-ebolas-back-door-america- 265668.html Bushmeat may be a luxury, but it may also pose a deadly threat. A memo obtained by Newsweek that circulated among customs officers and agriculture specialists in 2007 noted that bushmeat is “a potential vector of diseases such as Monkeypox, Ebola Virus, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and other communicable diseases.” Seven years later, the worst Ebola epidemic in history is ravaging West Africa. Though researchers cannot identify with absolute certainty the cause of the current Ebola outbreak, they do know the strain of virus, while being similar to the Zaire strain, is indigenous to Guinea, suggesting bushmeat was the source. Fruit bats are believed to be the “natural reservoir” of Ebola (meaning the virus can live in the bats for years without harming them), and scientists presume the virus makes its way into primates and other animals when they eat fruits half-eaten by and contaminated with the saliva of these bats. From those infected animals, the virus jumps to humans. “Just under 50 percent of Ebola outbreaks have been due to known handling of primate, great ape carcasses,” says Michael Jarvis, a virology and immunology expert at Britain’s Plymouth University. The most likely scenario for the jump is when an infected animal is being butchered and blood seeps into a cut on the hunter’s (or butcher’s) hand. “But we don’t know precisely,” says Dr. George Amato, director of the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics at the American Museum of Natural History. Amato adds that it’s also very possible that eating infected, improperly prepared meat could spread Ebola. Fruit bats and primates are two common forms of bushmeat consumed every day by people in Africa, and by those Africans living in the U.S. who have managed to find an illegal supplier. In a 2012 study, researchers working with government officials at John F. Kennedy Airport in the borough of Queens, New York (and some smaller airports) tested confiscated bushmeat, including baboon, chimpanzee, mangabey, guenon, green monkey and cane rat. They found that the meat does not arrive alone; it carries with it many unseen microorganisms. Smoked bushmeat may appear safe, but the flesh inside is still juicy—filled with blood, fresh tissue and more: Simian foamy virus and herpes viruses showed up in the samples of the confiscated meats. The researchers didn’t find Ebola, but they tested only a few samples. Cooking meat thoroughly will generally kill all pathogens, including viruses and bacteria, but most of the bushmeat arriving in the U.S. has been just barely processed in order to keep it from rotting while being transported. “If you wanted to safely transport meat and not worry about pathogens, you wouldn’t smoke it,” says Amato. “It’s not a very efficient way of killing microorganisms.” In addition, bushmeat may serve as a potential route for other diseases, “especially some of the livestock diseases, [like] hoof-and-mouth and African swine fever. Those can survive a very long time in a piece of meat,” says Bill Karesh, one of the authors of the 2012 study and a public health policy expert at EcoHealth Alliance. These and other pathogens could present dangers equally—or more—frightening than an Ebola outbreak. 
-Alex Kurtagic
#2. To: X-15 (#1)
Jeebus! The article didn't mention whether the govt affiliated militia in The Congo that have been chasing down and eating Mbuti Pygmies could contract Simian diseases if the Pygmies had eaten them. For some reason it just ain't PC to mention that cannibalism is alive and well in The Congo, and likely other places which haven't been reported. But it's documented that the Congo militiamen hold a spiritual belief that eating Pygmies benefits them. That's right up there with another widely held myth in Africa, that "...raping a virgin, even an infant (if there are no other virgins available) will cure AIDS." And I find it hard to believe that the good people of Papua New Guinea who contracted kuru from the ceremonial consumption of their dead tribe members are the only folks who would rather eat the dead than bust their asses in hot, muggy, buggy jungles hunting animals that could turn the tables on them. It may have evolved into a ceremonial ritual of respect but would it surprise anyone if it began as a matter of convenience for uninspired, late sleepers?
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