Where did HIV come from?

Proven content

From African chimpanzees or from American laboratories?

In 1986, the s announced that the HIV virus was created in the US while developing biological weapons. These allegations, however, were rejected by the world of science as propaganda. Nevertheless, since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, there has been no shortage of opinions that the disease was man-made, and even that the virus itself was deliberately introduced into the milieu of American homosexuals as part of an experiment.

In 1981, in New York and California, exceptionally numerous cases of very rare diseases were observed among young, previously healthy, homosexual men. Soon they had the same immunological defect – the impairment of cellular immunity caused by a significant decrease in T lymphocytes. This year was considered the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. The disease began to be studied intensively, and over time it was proved that AIDS existed before 1981, and not only in America. Cases of this disease were observed in 1975, other data indicate that it happened even earlier.

Many scientists have suggested that HIV was harmless prior to the outbreak of the AIDS pandemic. However, as a result of genetic changes, it has become very virulent. Scientists are inclined to argue that the HIV virus existed among isolated populations many years before the epidemic, only changes in lifestyle and hygiene, migration and travel widened the range of the virus’s occurrence.

The exact genesis of HIV is unknown, which has led to the formation of various, often pseudoscientific theories. Similarly, the ignorance of the disease itself and the methods of infection with the virus caused an irrational fear of it and the infected people. In Poland, we observed this phenomenon especially at the beginning of the 90s, such as protests of residents against the construction of centers for people suffering from AIDS and HIV-infected.

It is known for certain that AIDS is caused by HIV infection. The disease develops in the form of acute opportunistic infections (infections caused by microorganisms that do not cause disease in healthy people) and Kaposi’s sarcoma (malignant neoplasm of vascular origin).

Scientists say the disease came from Africa. The HIV virus was expected to penetrate the human population from certain animal species. It is especially blamed for monkeys living on the African continent, mainly chimpanzees. The virus found in these animals is most similar to “human”. Most scientists believe that it happened in the mid-50s. The history of medicine has repeatedly observed the transmission of pathogens from one animal species to another. Researchers from Los Alamos (USA), based on the analysis of genetic sequences of viruses from different periods, determined the existence of the last common ancestor for all HIV subtypes for 1931.

The transmission of HIV from the animal world to humans was initially unnoticed as it took place in isolated Central African communities. Political changes and migrations in the 60s and 70s made isolation of patients impossible. Rapid transmission of the virus has mainly occurred through people at risk, such as providing and using sexual services. But not only. Research carried out in the Congo in the 80s showed that the spread of HIV was caused, inter alia, by by using non-sterile injections.

The debate about the origin of HIV has been going on since the beginning of the epidemic. It intensified in the second half of the 80s, when various theories to ‘explain’ the virus’ origins emerged. Their common denominator was that the virus did not come from monkeys but was created by scientists in laboratories who had lost control of their invention.

One theory, invented by the s thirty years ago for the purposes of the Cold War, was that HIV was nothing but an American biological weapon. This theory, however, turned out to be so “twisted” by specialists in propaganda that it did not echo widely in the world, including the friendly USSR world.

However, even today we can hear echoes of the theory about the origin of HIV from experiments in the 60s and 70s. According to this opinion, gays and African Americans were infected with the virus as a result of vaccine experiments.

Conspiracy theorists blame “politically correct” scientists for not noticing a link between the 1981 outbreak of AIDS and an experimental hepatitis B vaccination program in 1978-1981 at the New York Blood Center, where mostly homosexuals volunteered . In their opinion, it is still unclear how the African disease would get into the gay community in the US.

Over time, AIDS conspiracy theories began to decline in popularity. Nevertheless, it was still quite alive at the end of the last century. It is enough to mention that nearly 30 percent. African Americans believed in 1999 that HIV had been produced in American laboratories by the government to wipe out the country’s black population.

A more scientific image was presented by the theories presented by the English journalist Edward Hooper in his book “The River”, published in 1999. He presented the view that HIV came to Africa in 1957-1960 as a result of an oral vaccination campaign against Heine-Medin disease. Well, the vaccine was to be created using chimpanzee kidney cells, which was to contribute to the transmission of the SIV virus from monkeys to humans. In 2000, however, tests were carried out on still existing vaccine samples that showed no SIV (simian immunodeficiency virus), HIV, or chimpanzee DNA.

In 2007, when the temperature of the discussion about the origin of HIV had subsided, American scientists discovered that it had reached the United States from Haiti in 1969. It was probably spread by an infected immigrant, so it turns out that the virus had killed 12 years before it was diagnosed by doctors in 1981.

To date, many issues relating to the origin of AIDS have not yet been clarified. These issues have been relegated to the background, more important is the prevention of infections and the development of more and more effective treatments.

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I used the materials of the National AIDS Center, www.aids.gov.pl, AIDS. A work of people ?, infra.org.pl

Tekst: Piotr Janczarek