7 ms·
We know the city where HIV first emerged
- theseatoms 11y agotl;dr, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo (then known as Leopoldville)
- caglar 11y agoThanks.
- fwn 11y agoThere's actually more content in the article. It's far from click-bait. After reading it I think that the exact city is the least interesting fact they have to offer.
- theseatoms 11y agoI don't disagree. The story is interesting. I just realized that anyone who read the headline would want to know what city. I probably came across snarkier than intended.
- kedean 11y agoClick-bait titles dont' mean the article is crap. It's a good article with a clickbait title, plain as that. Clickbait is when some information is left out of the title in an obvious way such that readers will click in pursuit of that piece of information, rather than clicking it in pursuit of expanding on the headline.
- simonebrunozzi 11y agoI believe you, but the name of the city could still be included in the title, at least.
- hawkice 11y agoBelgian control of the Congo was rife with pretty extreme abuse -- the obvious, often horrifying consequences of conquest. But the influx of ambitious businesspeople and capital which they claim started the wider outbreak of HIV, is a curious case. Often people will hand-wring about vague cultural factors, but this seems like one of the most concrete major international disasters caused by rapid gentrification and international investment. In many ways, whether you support e.g. more direct foreign investment areas in India and China or not, I'd prefer the conversations about costs to be as well formulated as this (I also suspect free trade and foreign investment in China and India has done a lot more good than HIV has done bad, even if you just count lives saved).
- nl 11y agoI think that any comparison with the Belgian rape of the Congo in the 1900's with rapid gentrification and international investment is completely unwarranted.
- caoilte 11y ago_rapid gentrification_ of Congo whuhh??? Just 'caus it had a CIA sponsored coup, doesn't mean things got any better.
- fabulist 11y agoThis would be the first time I've seen someone suggest gentrification makes things better.
- nonbel 11y agoSimian AIDS was discovered after human AIDS. How do they know the jump didn't occur in reverse? Here is the first report of simian AIDS: "Examination of the species-specific annual mortality rates of macaques at the center during the previous 4 yr showed a significant increase in deaths in 1980 and 1981" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC393899/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC393899/ Also, it is convenient they do not share the mcmc traces. Based on these settings I bet they were ugly: >"For each data set, at least 3 MCMC chains of 250 million steps were computed. Parameters and trees were sampled every 50,000th step. Samples were combined with LogCombiner (77) and between 10 to 30% of each MCMC chain was discarded as burn-in. MCMC mixing was diagnosed using visual trace inspection and calculation of effective sample sizes in Tracer (77). We report the posterior mean and 95% Bayesian credible intervals for evolutionary parameters." http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1256739 http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1256739 Another thing, they write: "Our estimated location of pandemic origin explains the observation that Kinshasa exhibits more contemporary HIV-1 genetic diversity than anywhere else" This is totally circular. As shown in their figure S2, they used genetic diversity in a region as an indication of earlier presence.
- tomphoolery 11y ago> Simian AIDS was discovered after human AIDS. How do they know the jump didn't occur in reverse? I'm not sure we (that is, humans) realized that SIV was a thing until HIV prompted us to look in those places. It's the classic example of not knowing what to look for until you've found it.
- nonbel 11y agoI agree, the time of discovery proves nothing. But I asked how they can tell either way since there is no data from earlier. However, I would think captive animals were monitored more closely for strange diseases than people in rural mid-1900s Africa.
- RyanZAG 11y agoYou'd probably be wrong about that. Even today in most of these places, a captive animal that dies is just 'sick' and disposed of. Or often sold off as food if the death symptoms aren't obviously apparent, as would be the case with HIV. There is no functioning FDA in central africa.
- achille 11y agoThere's an excellent Radiolab Podcast that covers the same study, I'd highly recommend listening to it: * http://www.radiolab.org/story/169879-patient-zero/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/169879-patient-zero/
- anton_gogolev 11y agoThere's also an updated version which briefly covers recent Ebola outbreak: http://www.radiolab.org/story/patient-zero-updated/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/patient-zero-updated/
- univalent 11y agoThanks! I didn't know about the updated one. The original is one of my favorite episodes.
- douglasisshiny 11y agoSame here, although the description of chimps hunting was a bit disturbing.
- olegious 11y agoThe book "The history of AIDS" was a fascinating and accessible read on the subject of the spread of HIV, from it's origins to today.
- masklinn 11y agoDefinitely, highly recommended book. Learned of it from Quammen's "Spillover"[0] (a great — if somewhat terrifying — book in its own right) mentioning it as a source in the AIDS chapter and it was a fantastic read. Note that Quammen released his own AIDS-history book this hear, "The Chimp and the River"[1] (haven't read it yet though I intend to). Direct link to Jacques Pépin's "The Origin of AIDS" on amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0521186374 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0521186374 [0] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0393346617/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/0393346617/ [1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0393350843/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/0393350843/
- AnAfrican 11y agoIt's not really clear to me: Are they saying that the jump happened in a large metropolis ? Or that Kinshasa was the first large city in which HIV became an epidemic ?
- WalterSear 11y agoThe first large city.
- nikatwork 11y agoIt's a morbid irony that HIV emerged from "Leopoldville" considering the other atrocities unleashed on Africa by Leopold II.
- splouk 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_II_of_Belgium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_II_of_Belgium If anyone else is curious like I was.
- jackgavigan 11y agotl;dr - Kinshasa.
- random778 11y agoKinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
- simonebrunozzi 11y agoIs HN becoming "spammy"? In this case, would it hurt to include the name of the city in the title?