🚀 go-pugleaf

rosaphil wrote:

> HIV/AIDS Briefs
> NewsPlanet Staff
> Thursday, August 12, 1999 / 06:25 PM
>
> SUMMARY: 1969 U.S. HIV case reopens origin question ... new stats on
> the calculated risk of safer sex ... FDA cautions online home test
> buyers....
>
> 1969 AIDS Case Questions Roots
> Recent genetic and mathematical studies seemed to have nailed the
> origin of AIDS in non-human primates in Africa, but the issue has been
> reopened by tissue saved from a young man who died in St. Louis,
> Missouri in 1969. Physicians froze the sample because they were
> surprised to find Kaposi's sarcoma in a 15-year-old African-American,
> when at the time it was almost exclusively found in older men of
> Mediterranean descent. The teen was described as a sex worker.
>
> The sample was analyzed by Professor Robert Garry of the Tulane
> University Medical Center, who presented his finding that the youth
> was in fact infected with HIV at the 11th International Congress of
> Virology in Sydney on August 10. That puts HIV in the U.S. a decade
> earlier than had previously been recognized, and means that the theory
> that the virus jumped species 50 - 60 years ago can only stand if a
> very rapid rate of viral evolution is assumed. To Garry it seems
> almost as likely that HIV has always been a human virus, its
> evolutionary path splitting off from the simian virus' when humans and
> monkeys diverged some 100,000 years ago.
>
> The virus found in the young man's tissue lacks the infectivity that
> has made HIV a global pandemic, because it targets T-cells rather than
> the more mobile macrophages that help to transmit the contemporary
> virus.

I question why this is being reported as new evidence.  Unless I am mistaken,
or this is another very similar case, this was first reported 4 to 5 or more
years ago.  The case I remember also involved a young man, also in St. Louis,
and the attending physician had such an unusual name that I remember it
to this day -- Dr. Elvin Memory Jones.

Further, I also remember reports that tissue from a much older case had
been re-examined, and found to contain antibodies to HIV-3.  This was
from a young sailor who died in 1959 in England of such unusual complications
that the attending physicians immediately took tissue and fluid samples and
preserved them.

-Bill