|  | Public Health Safety | Public Health

Theory of the Origin of AIDS

While the specific origin of AIDS, or the virus that causes it, HIV, has never been concretely determined, scientists have been able to track it to chimpanzees. The production of the polio vaccine and hepatitis B vaccine have also been put forth as theories for how HIV spread.

  1. First AIDS case

    • It wasn't until 1981 when the first AIDS case was reported in the United States. While not coined "AIDS" at the time, gay men from New York to California were turning up in hospitals with opportunistic infections and cancers that couldn't be treated due to failing immune systems. The human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, was discovered to be the cause by Dr. Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris and Dr. Anthony Gallo of the National Cancer Institute in Washington three years later.

    Lentivirus

    • Once HIV was discovered to be part of a family of lentiviruses, or "slow viruses," that attack the immune system, scientists were able to concretely link it to simian immunodeficiency virus, or SIV, in chimpanzees. It has been accepted that HIV descended from SIV prevalent in chimps found in west-central Africa.

    Viral sex

    • In 1999, Dr. Beatrice Hahn of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Paul Sharp of Nottingham University, and their team of researchers found that two separate strains of SIV had infected wild chimps, having "viral sex" within their systems to form a third virus that was able to infect humans: HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Since humans are technically animals, evolving from chimpanzees no less, we are susceptible to viral transfer.

    Patient Zero

    • Scientists believe a human was infected with HIV in the African Congo in 1959. His blood had been stored for decades and tested once AIDS was known to exist. The theory remains that a chimpanzee bite or the ingestion of SIV-infected chimp meat ("The Hunter Theory") infected "Patient Zero" with SIV, which then adapted into HIV.

    Polio vaccine

    • An oral polio vaccine, Chat, was distributed to villagers in Congo, Rwanda and Urundi in the late 1950s. Journalist Edward Hooper contends that Chat, grown on chimpanzee kidney cells, became infected with SIV, leading to adaptation to HIV in humans. This theory is criticized considering that oral administration of the vaccine would not have made it into the bloodstream to cause infection.

    Conspiracy?

    • There are skeptics who maintain the belief that HIV is man-made, manufactured for biological warfare that was intended to wipe out the black and homosexual communities. The method of HIV infection in this conspiracy theory is the hepatitis B vaccine, tested first in New York City among gay men, and in Central African villages, between 1972 and 1974. While the basis for such a theory is mere speculation, chimpanzees were used as the first test subjects and since they could have contained viruses like SIV, the hepatitis B vaccinations could have become infected.

Public Health - Related Articles