Essay on the Origin of AIDS

The history of AIDS is a short one. As recently as the 1970s, no one was aware of this deadly illness.

Since then the global AIDS epidemic has become one of the greatest threats to human health and development. AIDS first came to light in the early 1980s. The first recognised cases of AIDS occurred in USA in the early 1980s.

A number of gay men in New York and California suddenly began to develop rare opportunistic infections and cancers that seemed stubbornly resistant to any treatment.

At that time, AIDS did not yet have a name, but it quickly became obvious that all the men were suffering from a common syndrome and it was referred as ‘Gay men’s immune deficiency Syndrome’. The discovery of HIV, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, was made soon after.

Since certain strains of SIVs bear a very close resemblance to the two types of HIV it is now generally accepted that HIV is a descendant of a Simian Immunodeficiency Virus.

In February 1999 a group of researchers from the University of Alabama announced that they had found a type of SIVcpz that was almost identical to HIV-1.

This particular strain was identified in a frozen sample taken from a captive member of the sub-group of chimpanzees known as Pan Troglodytes (P. t. troglodytes), which were once common in west- central Africa. They claimed that this sample proved that chimpanzees were the source of HIV-1, and that the virus had at some point crossed species from chimps to humans.

Four of the earliest known instances of HIV infection are as follows:

1. A plasma sample taken in 1959 from an adult male living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

2. A lymph node sample taken in 1960 from an adult female, also from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

3. HIV found in tissue samples from an American teenager who died in St. Louis in 1969.

4. HIV found in tissue samples from a Norwegian sailor who died around 1976.

A1998 analysis of the plasma sample from 1959 suggested that HIV-1 infected the humans around the 1940s or the early 1950s.

In January 2000, the results of a new study suggested that the first case of HIV- 1 infection occurred around 1931 in West Africa. This estimate (which had a 15 year margin of error) was based on a complex computer model of HIV’s evolution.

However, a study in 2008 dated the origin of HIV between 1884 and 1924, much earlier than previous estimates.

The researchers compared the viral sequence from 1959 (the oldest known HIV-1 specimen) to the newly discovered sequence from 1960. They found a significant genetic difference between them; demonstrating diversification of HIV-1 occurred long before the AIDS pandemic was recognised.