4 ms·

I think the long incubation times of some of these is a counterexample. Someone eats a monkey in rural Cameroon or Congo, and 10 years later they and their sex

I think the long incubation times of some of these is a counterexample. Someone eats a monkey in rural Cameroon or Congo, and 10 years later they and their sexual partners have their immune system collapse. Will they know the connection? Some sources say that happened circa 1910. It wasn't identified until the 80s. In the meantime there were some bunk theories tied to homosexuality, drug use, or poverty as the root cause. I have heard that prion diseases can have even longer periods before they surface after exposure.

dmix 7y ago
> It wasn't identified until the 80s. We didn't identify any retroviruses until the late 70s, we didn't know to look for them. That's different. The first peer reviewed paper on human retroviruses wasn't until 1984. https://retrovirology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1742-4690-6-40 https://retrovirology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/174...
- asveikau 7y ago
  They gave it a name, AIDS, in 1982. In my read of your comment, the claim is they should have, through statistics, been able to draw it back to the food source contamination that is now believed to have been a problem about 70 years prior. In other words, it can take a long time to notice the correlation. I don't think it's much of a stretch to guess that there could be other such correlations, present and future, that have not been discovered or will take some time to discover.