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>But Michael Worobey, head of the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, who was also not involved in the recent study, is
by RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
>But Michael Worobey, head of the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, who was also not involved in the recent study, is more sanguine. Worobey says it is not a surprise that there are a diverse number of HIV strains in Central Africa, which is where the disease originated. Identifying a new one does not add much to the knowledge of HIV, he says.
> “It’s actually misleading to describe genetic diversity from the [Democratic Republic of the] Congo as a new subtype,” Worobey says, “because the only useful meaning of the term ‘subtype’” would come from identification of a lineage of the virus that has spread significantly beyond Central Africa. Guidelines for classifying new strains of HIV were established in 2000. The recently discovered subtype belongs to the most common form of HIV, group M, which accounts for more than 90 percent of all HIV cases, Rodgers says.
The amount of press that this has gotten, seems to me like a submarine marketing job by Abbott.
- xenadu02 7y agoIndeed, and HIV is a “natural reservoir” disease that will continue to generate new strains even if we managed to eradicate it from the human population. The simian variant is just too compatible with us to ever really go away.
- Leherenn 7y agoWould it be possible to eradicate it from the simian population as well since they are so similar? I assume it would highly depend on how it is eradicated in humans, but the difficulty in finding and treating them would be balanced by what is I imagine a much lower population.
- JauntTrooper 7y agoAssuming the simian carriers don't go extinct over the next few decades.
- asveikau 7y agoIf we eradicate it in humans and also people stop eating bushmeat (or including chimpanzees or whatever in that category) then it seems to me like it would be unlikely to make the jump back to humans. This actually raises an interesting question about potential diseases lurking in food sources. We now have 20/20 hindsight that eating an ape caused this and is therefore a bad idea. They obviously didn't know that when they chose to eat apes. There could be other such food sources that we don't know to be problematic yet. I am reminded of prions and mad cow, kind of a similar story.
- djsumdog 7y agoDo prions actually lead to Alzheimer's? I've read a lot of conflicting articles on that lately.
- austinjp 7y agoPrions do lead to certain degenerative brain diseases. Alzheimer's is caused by different factors, though. Perhaps you're thinking of beta amyloid tangles, which are a different matter.
- dmix 7y agoMuch like how they found the bushmeat apes as a source and with madcow prions, when a whole bunch of people are getting sick it's usually pretty easy to use statistics to determine a common food or infection source. The implications of food on longer term stuff like cancer will always be a hard thing to nail down but for serious diseases like this I don't think its currently a huge barrier.
- londons_explore 7y ago> pretty easy to use statistics to determine a common food or infection source. It's getting harder. Privacy protections mean this type of analysis across hundreds of millions of records isn't really possible anymore. Without hundreds of millions of records, identifying "people who drank milk from Mr Smiths farm in 1969 were 200% more likely to get parkinsons 45 years later" couldn't be done. Yet if Mr Smiths farm had cows with some as-yet unidentified prion disease, this is the only way we'd find it.