History of HIV/AIDS
Scientists generally accept that the known strains (or groups) of HIV-1 are most closely related to the simian immunodeficiency viruses (SIVs) endemic in wild ape populations of West Central African forests.
The resulting phylogenetic analyses show that the viruses most closely related to the two strains of HIV-2 that spread considerably in humans (HIV-2 groups A and B) are the SIVsmm found in the sooty mangabeys of the Tai forest, in western Ivory Coast.
It is clear that the several HIV-1 and HIV-2 strains descend from SIVcpz, SIVgor, and SIVsmm viruses,[3][8][9][10][12][20] and that bushmeat practice provides the most plausible cause of cross-species transfer to humans.
Genetic studies of the virus suggested in 2008 that the most recent common ancestor of the HIV-1 M group dates back to the Belgian Congo city of Léopoldville (modern Kinshasa), circa 1910.
[27] It is also believed that passengers riding on the region's Belgian railway trains were able to spread the virus to larger areas, combining with the active sex trade, rapid population growth and unsterilized needles used in health clinics to create what became the African AIDS crisis.
[1] Beatrice Hahn, Paul M. Sharp, and their colleagues proposed that "[the epidemic emergence of HIV] most likely reflects changes in population structure and behaviour in Africa during the 20th century and perhaps medical interventions that provided the opportunity for rapid human-to-human spread of the virus".
In the nascent cities women felt relatively liberated from rural tribal rules[28] and many remained unmarried or divorced during long periods,[13][29] this being rare in African traditional societies.
[17] Amit Chitnis, Diana Rawls, and Jim Moore proposed that HIV may have emerged epidemically as a result of harsh conditions, forced labor, displacement, and unsafe injection and vaccination practices associated with colonialism, particularly in French Equatorial Africa.
[31] The workers in plantations, construction projects, and other colonial enterprises were supplied with bushmeat, which would have contributed to an increase in hunting and, it follows, a higher incidence of human exposure to SIV.
This theory was later dubbed "Heart of Darkness" by Jim Moore,[35] alluding to the book of the same title written by Joseph Conrad, the main focus of which is colonial abuses in equatorial Africa.
In several articles published since 2001, Preston Marx, Philip Alcabes, and Ernest Drucker proposed that HIV emerged because of rapid serial human-to-human transmission of SIV (after a bushmeat hunter or handler became SIV-infected) through unsafe or unsterile injections.
[39] Jacques Pépin and Annie-Claude Labbé reviewed the colonial health reports of Cameroon and French Equatorial Africa for the period 1921–59, calculating the incidences of the diseases requiring intravenous injections.
According to Pépin's 2011 book, The Origins of AIDS,[41] the virus can be traced to a central African bush hunter in 1921, with colonial medical campaigns using improperly sterilized syringe and needles playing a key role in enabling a future epidemic.
Leaving aside blood transfusions, the highest HIV-1 transmissibility ever measured was from female prostitutes with 85% prevalence of HIV to uncircumcised men with GUD; 43% contracted HIV-1 after a single sexual exposure.
[47] SIV pathogenicity in wild animals could exist in other chimpanzee subspecies and other primate species as well, and stay unrecognized by lack of relevant long term studies.
A Canadian airline steward named Gaëtan Dugas was referred to as "Case 057" and later "Patient O" with the alphabet letter "O" standing for "outside Southern California", in an early AIDS study by Dr. William Darrow of the Centers for Disease Control.
A volunteer social worker called Betty Williams, a Quaker who worked with the homeless in New York from the seventies and early eighties onwards, has talked about people at that time whose death would be labelled as "junkie flu" or "the dwindles".
"[71][74] Julia Epstein writes in her book Altered Conditions: Disease, Medicine and Storytelling that: "As we uncover more of the early history of HIV infection, it becomes clear that by at least the 1970s the virus was already making major inroads into the immune systems of a number of diverse populations in the United States (the retrospectively diagnosed epidemic of 'junkie pneumonia' in New York City in the late 1970s for example) and had for some time been causing devastation in several countries in Africa.
"[74] A chapter in The Proceedings of the World Conference of Therapeutic Communities (9th, San Francisco, California, September 1–6, 1985) gives details about serum samples that were tested for signs of HIV (then called HTLV-III/LAV) antibodies.
"[80][81] Anna Thompson writes on the website TheBody.com in an article dated Autumn 1993: "Many women were dying in the late '70s of pneumonia, cervical cancer, and other illnesses complicated by 'mysteriously' suppressed immune systems.
"[83] The statistics Crimp writes about were taken from a New York Times article from October 1987 about a NYC Department of Health study that showed that 53% of AIDS sufferers were people who injected drugs – more than 150 percent higher than previously reported.
[86][85] In Spring 1975, the government of New York City underwent a fiscal crisis which led to the closing of many social services, with people who used intravenous drugs living in a hostile sociopolitical and legal environment.
"[87] A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1986 linked TB and HIV/AIDS:[88] "Severe and unusual presentation of overwhelming tuberculosis in appropriate clinical circumstances may be considered an infection predictive of the presence of AIDS."
[91] Over the next 18 months, more PCP clusters were discovered among otherwise healthy men in cities throughout the country, along with other opportunistic diseases (such as Kaposi's sarcoma[92] and persistent, generalized lymphadenopathy),[93] common in immunosuppressed patients.
Because AIDS disproportionately affected stigmatized groups, such as homosexuals, people of low socioeconomic status, sex workers and addicts, there was also initially little mass media coverage when the epidemic started.
The United States have gone through great lengths with the Affordable Care Act to ensure the protection and fairness of health insurance for Americans affected by HIV/AIDS, but it does not ignore the hardships and discrimination many people had to endure due to the virus’s behavior.
[112] They are noted as one of the first in finding genuine solutions within the healthcare system and pushing for commendable changes within state insurance laws and legislation, especially the “exclusionary policies against gay men”.
[117] In May 1983, a team of doctors at the Pasteur Institute in France including Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier reported that they had isolated a new retrovirus from lymphoid ganglions that they believed was the cause of AIDS.
According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2008, a team led by Robert Shafer at Stanford University School of Medicine discovered that the gray mouse lemur has an endogenous lentivirus (the genus to which HIV belongs) in its genetic makeup.
In addition, the time frame falls in the period when Madagascar was still connected to what is now the African continent; the said lemurs later developed immunity to the virus strain and survived an era when the lentivirus was widespread among other mammals.
