Scientists Find Origin of AIDS

Reuters
11:30 a.m. 1.Feb.2000 PST

Researchers using one of the most powerful computers in the world said they had traced the origin of the AIDS virus, dating it to around 1930.

"We estimated the time of origin of the HIV-1 main group to be near 1930," they said in a written statement at the 7th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections.

This fits in with previous estimates.

"It is important to establish the onset of the AIDS epidemic in order to better understand the possible routes and circumstances of zoonotic (animal-to-human) transmission, as well as how rapidly HIV-1 evolves in human populations," Korber's group said.

Scientists believe HIV, which has infected nearly 40 million people worldwide, began after an ape and monkey version known as simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) jumped from chimpanzees to human beings in western central Africa.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says it probably occurred during the slaughter of chimpanzees as early as the 1930s.

People in some parts of Africa often hunt and kill chimpanzees, and a virus can easily spread from blood during butchering.

There is a second strain of HIV that infects people, known as HIV-2. It is believed to have started out in a monkey known as a sooty mangabey.

Last year Dr. Beatrice Hahn of the University of Alabama at Birmingham told the same meeting that her team had confirmed this chimp-to-human jump by analyzing a virus that infected a lab chimp named Marilyn after she died at the age of 26.

The oldest specimen of HIV was found in blood collected in 1959 from an adult Bantu man in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Much attention was given this year to a book written by British journalist Edward Hooper, who suggests that batches of polio vaccine may have been made from chimp kidneys and tainted with SIV.

It was tested in the United States and given orally to hundreds of thousands of children during trials in the then Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, during the 1950s.

Scientists at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia who worked on the vaccine deny they used chimpanzee kidneys to produce the vaccine.

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