18 ms·

Oldest 'nearly complete' HIV genome found in forgotten tissue sample from 1966

386 points by mmoez 6y ago

TamaraBoyle 6y ago
I'm recommending Dr Osato to everyone who have herpes simplex virus to get the cure from him. I was diagnose of genital herpes in 2019 and i have been searching and asking questions to see if i could get something to cure the disease because i did not believe what the doctors say that no cure is found yet. I came across a comment on Youtube and the person testify how she was cured from herpes and hpv after using Dr Osato herbal medicine. I quickly contact Dr Osato and explain my problem to him and he prepare the herbs and send it to me through UPS and gave me instructions on how to use it and tell me to go for checkup after usage which i did after two weeks of taken the herbal medicine and my result was NEGATIVE. I waited another month and retested the result was still NEGATIVE and my doctor told me that am completely free from herpes. Am so happy and grateful to Dr Osato for what he has done for me and i will continue to share this for people out there to know that there is cure for herpes. You can contact Dr Osato on email and WhatsApp to get the cure from him. Email: osatoherbalcure@gmail.com and WhatsApp +2347051705853.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
djaque 6y ago
I didn't understand the AIDS epidemic until I listened to a podcast [1] where they interviewed a gay survivor. I can't imagine my friends dying off one by one around me from an unknown specter. The government pretending you didn't exist and ignoring you because it was a "gay problem". Society demonizing you. He said that even after it was understood that AIDS was not transmissible by touch, morgues would refuse to accept the bodies of gay men. When people knew they were at the end of the rope, they would ask their friends to throw their ashes over the fence into the white house lawn. That way as their final act, they could tell the government that their active silence was literally killing people and that even if they considered them others, they wouldn't be ignored. It's heartbreaking, but I'd recommend anyone to listen to the interview if you don't know much about that period in history. [1] https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/shame-on-you/e/66787240 https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/shame-on-you/e/66787240
- klmadfejno 6y ago
  The white house lawn comment sounds powerful. But I don't see any evidence it actually happened. Right?
  - djaque 6y ago
    Looking closer I found this [1] which is the guy the interviewee was speaking about. It looks like it was his ashes, not literally his corpse. I think it was referred to as his body in the podcast which is where I got it from, but I'm assuming that was in the sense of "what remains of his body". I'll update my post. It looks like the white house lawn is home to the remains of at least 18 gay men that died from AIDS. [1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vdqv34/why-the-ashes-of-aids-victims-on-the-white-house-lawn-matter https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vdqv34/why-the-ashes-of-a...
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    I followed the AIDS crisis in the newspaper from Day One, starting with one-inch long columns about "mysterious purple lesions called Kaposi's sarcoma" to shrines with hundreds of photos occupying whole sections. The similarity with corona in 2020 is that so little was known, but for years, not months. The difference was that AIDS was 100% fatal until drugs were developed, and AIDS killed a generation of young adults rather than older people. (There were interviews with a handful of men who were immune to the AIDS virus, but had to endure all of their friends and partners dying, and had to deal with inheriting a lot of possessions that reminded them of dead people.) Almost all hemophiliacs in North America used pooled blood products from thousands of donors, so just about all of them died. (There's a Canadian film on Youtube that covers this.)
    - dghughes 6y ago
      >There's a Canadian film on Youtube that covers this. Yeah it was a major scandal here in Canada. The Red Cross lost the right to handle blood a new organization called Canadian Blood Services was created. Many people with hemophilia died but I think people at the tail end of it were around when the new drug cocktails slowed the disease. As a teen in the 80s AIDS was pretty scary even for a straight kid with no girlfriend. It seemed like everyone was talking about it, getting it, scared of people with it, or denying it existed. Anthony Fauci had a hard time getting Pres. Reagan to even take it seriously (sound familiar!?). Many conservatives saw it as the "gay disease" and dismissed it as irrelevant.
bluetwo 6y ago
Semi-related: Thinking about this era I wondered how long it look for AIDS to kill 100,000 Americans. The answer is about 5 years. CoViD did it in 5 months.
- sn41 6y ago
  It's disturbing that we are being told to learn to live with the virus when there is such a high risk of contraction.
  - CyberDildonics 6y ago
    As opposed to what exactly?
  - fennecfoxen 6y ago
    Insofar as you are being told this, the reason you are being told is the high risk of contraction.
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    High risk but most infected have close to no symptoms which is nothing like AIDS which used to be a death sentence.
    - ImaCake 6y ago
      But even a tiny mortality rate is catastrophic when talking about city and country sized populations. The lockdowns happened for a reason, because this disease overwhelms public health.
      - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
        And if enough people start dying the disease overwhelms public everything. In the UK, some schools are refusing to reopen and some people are refusing to return to work in spite of government orders.
interestica 6y ago
"When AIDS was funny" https://youtu.be/yAzDn7tE1lU https://youtu.be/yAzDn7tE1lU It shows the challenges of the press to have serious conversations about the disease with the Reagan administration.
- MiroF 6y ago
  This makes my blood boil.
- kazinator 6y ago
  Anally-Inflicted Death Sentence! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jvVsf789y8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jvVsf789y8
- Fezzik 6y ago
  Is it that much different than how everyone jokes about HSV1 today? It is still a (ridiculous and stupid) running punchline on SNL. Obviously it is a far less dire virus (as far as we know, today) but, we as a species (generally) compared to our individual potential, are absolute idiots and almost always take the easy intellectual route (humor and bullshit) when faced with uncommon information. The video really seems like par for the course and not surprising in the slightest...
  - umanwizard 6y ago
    “far less dire” is an understatement. HSV-1 causes only cosmetic effects in the vast majority of cases.
    - Fezzik 6y ago
      That is... not exactly true: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/06/21/621908340/researchers-find-herpes-viruses-in-brains-marked-by-alzheimers-disease https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/06/21/6219083... I was not trying to diminish the atrocity that is how the AIDS epidemic was handled, I was only trying to illuminate that people (and the super-majority of our lawmakers) are immature and uninformed when talking about all infectious diseases. Edit: just look at our President’s response to Covid... it is bumbling and moronic.
at_a_remove 6y ago
I remember how little was known in the beginning, when it was called GRID. For a while it was theorized in the media that semen hitting the bloodstream was causing the immune system to freak out; my friends, who had just started puberty, asked me (as the designated science nerd) what I thought of that, as they had somewhat random scenarios of nocturnal emissions striking road rash from skateboarding. I thought it unlikely, given what I knew of history. We had very little idea of what constituted "transmissible" and what did not for a period of time, and so while our parents had "free love" and The Pill, with the biggest risk being herpes, at least a section of my generation got "sex = death" internalized on top of all of the other apocalyptic gloom. Of course, even what would be transmissible was subject to propaganda: on one side, you had people arguing for any gay sex being a risk, but on the other side, some activists insisted that heterosexual intercourse was exactly and precisely as risky as homosexual (male) intercourse. Quite a lot of misinformation floating around.
- ngold 6y ago
  Grew up at the tale end of that, during reagan 80's. Learned how to hide under a desk for nukes. Hide under a doorframe for quakes. But Ghostbusters was good.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  There are still a lot people spreading the misinformation that hetero sex is as risky as anal sex, because they have some odd agenda to push.
  - NelsonMinar 6y ago
    You understand heterosexual people have anal sex too, right? It's become quite trendy.
    - bagacrap 6y ago
      s/hetero/vanilla and the point stands
    - at_a_remove 6y ago
gjkood 6y ago
If you have time I would recommend two movies that touches deeply upon this topic. They are 'Philadelphia'[1] which garnered a 'Best Actor' Oscar for Tom Hanks and 'And the band played on'[2] starring Mathew Modine. 'Philadelphia' a fictional movie that touches on the social stigma associated with HIV and 'And the band played on' captures the politics of why it was ignored by Reagan and his supporters for so long and the sad politics and scientific infighting in the chase for a cure. Both are incredible movies. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107818/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_3 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107818/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_3 [2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106273/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106273/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
- rurban 6y ago
  A much more interesting Aids movie is Cold Case Hammerskjöld, which could explain the discrepancy of existence of the virus in these early samples. Highly controversial though. https://youtu.be/ZrUkRs8wDo0 https://youtu.be/ZrUkRs8wDo0
- jdm2212 6y ago
  Both are really incredible movies, and I'd also highly recommend them. "How To Survive A Plague" is pretty great too (it even features everyone's favorite NIH official, Anthony Fauci!). One thing worth being aware of with "And The Band Played On": it's quite old, and science advanced a lot after the book it's based on was written, so it's sometimes factually inaccurate (Gaetan Dugas didn't personally cause the pandemic, and the incubation period is longer than they thought then). It's not a work of history or a documentary, but it makes for fascinating viewing precisely because it was made so close to the events that the story it tells is not neat and polished with the benefit of decades of hindsight and narrative shaping. It's chaotic and emotional and raw and authentic and, inevitably, sometimes wrong about stuff that wasn't known then.
  - overkill28 6y ago
    The Gaetan Dugas thing seems to dominate every discussion about And The Band Plays on which is too bad because the book is like 600 pages long, tracks dozens of real life individuals, has tons of incredible primary source material, and gives a very touching, grounded, contemporary look at AIDS in the early 80s. And out of the small portion of the book that talks about Dugas, I never got the impression that Schilts was trying the blame him for causing the pandemic, but rather that he was using him as a real life example of the type of man that existed in that era, who flew around the country having sex with thousands (yes thousands) of other men, whose behavior doubtlessly and unknowingly sped the spread of AIDS.
ddingus 6y ago
https://youtu.be/0KthBMpST7Q https://youtu.be/0KthBMpST7Q A 90's film telling the story of how AIDS was ignored.
ImaCake 6y ago
People might be interested in why this useful. Much like with Covid today, scientists are interested in understanding when the disease first appeared. Because that gives us clues about where it came from and how quickly it is changing now. You can estimate this based on changes in the sequence of the genome. Changes (mutations) will appear in the genome at a predictable rate ("mutation rate"), and is measured as mutations per generation. For HIV, there are plenty of estimates for the mutation rate based off a mixture of statistical bioinformatics and knowledge of genetics. But they are all inferences because we don't have many sequences from before 1988. This relatively ancient genome allows scientists to see how good their estimates are by looking at a genome that will have -20 years worth of mutations. Turns out the estimates are really good. I would then draw the link back to Covid where the mutation rate is estimated in the same way. So it's a good bet that the date estimated for Covid's emergence is pretty close to the mark. You can see the paper here[0]. I think the actual paper would make a better link on HN, but I guess the press release is useful for those without a molecular biology background. 0. https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/05/18/1913682117 https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/05/18/1913682117
- acqq 6y ago
  It's also relevant to demonstrate now that this virus too hasn't been made in the lab. The "lab origin" is a claim that some like to spread on every outbreak, even in spite of the fact that virologists know that nature produces the viruses very easily and there are no facts supporting anything else this time too. From the abstract: "Our phylogenetic analyses date the origin of the pandemic lineage of HIV-1 to a time period around the turn of the 20th century (1881 to 1918)." At that time humanity didn't even know what the virus really is -- they just knew that something in some liquid transmits some illness. The most advanced lab at that time could only get that liquid using the filters.
  - simias 6y ago
    It's pointless to try to prove anything to conspiracionists, they'll just tweak their stories and continue as if nothing happened. Anything that goes against their narrative is ignored and quickly forgotten, anything that appears to remotely vaguely confirm their beliefs is amplified and repeated ad nauseam. Don't waste your time with them. You cannot reason people out of something they were not reasoned into.
joyj2nd 6y ago
TLDR: The "news" is not the age of the samples, there are older ones, but that the virus genome is still intact and allows for a more accurate estimation of mutation rates and origins of HIV. "There are older fragments of HIV out there, one from 1959 and one from 1960, also from DRC. But those pieces aren't as complete, and thus can't offer as much information about the virus' mutations. "
temptemptemp111 6y ago
The same is true of the "novel" corona virus. The only novel thing about it is the fiction they wrote.
masklinn 6y ago
> Those fragments were also from different subtypes of HIV, Gryseels said, which shows that the virus had been circulating for some time in humans before the 1950s. That was already pretty much a certainty from the already known fragmentary genomes (also mostly from the DRC), as well as the phylogenetic analysis of known strains, groups and subtypes.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  Was this restricted to Africa?
  - masklinn 6y ago
    Looks so. The virus seems to have "brewed" in the Congo basin for a few decades, possibly amplified by the vaccination campaigns of the early 20th century (as they'd be using the same glass syringes and steel needles for dozens of patients). If it got out before the second half of the 20th century it apparently didn't manage to gain enough of a foothold to go pandemic[0]. Though the long incubation rate and somewhat mixed symptoms also make it somewhat uncertain. [0] as may have been the case for Robert Rayford who looks to have been something of a terminal case rather than vector or victim of a more widespread infection
    - Engineering-MD 6y ago
      I’m skepticism that vaccinations would have increased it much tbh. A needle stick from a patient with HIV has a 1/300 chance of transmitting HIV, so it would probably have had a very limited impact. Needle sharing amongst IVDUs is higher risk due to the repeated exposure to the small risk.
williesleg 6y ago
Interesting, from China.

386 points by mmoez 6y ago

I'm recommending Dr Osato to everyone who have herpes simplex virus to get the cure from him. I was diagnose of genital herpes in 2019 and i have been searching and asking questions to see if i could get something to cure the disease because i did not believe what the doctors say that no cure is found yet. I came across a comment on Youtube and the person testify how she was cured from herpes and hpv after using Dr Osato herbal medicine. I quickly contact Dr Osato and explain my problem to him and he prepare the herbs and send it to me through UPS and gave me instructions on how to use it and tell me to go for checkup after usage which i did after two weeks of taken the herbal medicine and my result was NEGATIVE. I waited another month and retested the result was still NEGATIVE and my doctor told me that am completely free from herpes. Am so happy and grateful to Dr Osato for what he has done for me and i will continue to share this for people out there to know that there is cure for herpes. You can contact Dr Osato on email and WhatsApp to get the cure from him. Email: osatoherbalcure@gmail.com and WhatsApp +2347051705853.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

djaque 6y ago

I didn't understand the AIDS epidemic until I listened to a podcast [1] where they interviewed a gay survivor. I can't imagine my friends dying off one by one around me from an unknown specter. The government pretending you didn't exist and ignoring you because it was a "gay problem". Society demonizing you. He said that even after it was understood that AIDS was not transmissible by touch, morgues would refuse to accept the bodies of gay men. When people knew they were at the end of the rope, they would ask their friends to throw their ashes over the fence into the white house lawn. That way as their final act, they could tell the government that their active silence was literally killing people and that even if they considered them others, they wouldn't be ignored. It's heartbreaking, but I'd recommend anyone to listen to the interview if you don't know much about that period in history. [1] https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/shame-on-you/e/66787240 https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/shame-on-you/e/66787240

klmadfejno 6y ago
The white house lawn comment sounds powerful. But I don't see any evidence it actually happened. Right?
- djaque 6y ago
  Looking closer I found this [1] which is the guy the interviewee was speaking about. It looks like it was his ashes, not literally his corpse. I think it was referred to as his body in the podcast which is where I got it from, but I'm assuming that was in the sense of "what remains of his body". I'll update my post. It looks like the white house lawn is home to the remains of at least 18 gay men that died from AIDS. [1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vdqv34/why-the-ashes-of-aids-victims-on-the-white-house-lawn-matter https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vdqv34/why-the-ashes-of-a...
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  I followed the AIDS crisis in the newspaper from Day One, starting with one-inch long columns about "mysterious purple lesions called Kaposi's sarcoma" to shrines with hundreds of photos occupying whole sections. The similarity with corona in 2020 is that so little was known, but for years, not months. The difference was that AIDS was 100% fatal until drugs were developed, and AIDS killed a generation of young adults rather than older people. (There were interviews with a handful of men who were immune to the AIDS virus, but had to endure all of their friends and partners dying, and had to deal with inheriting a lot of possessions that reminded them of dead people.) Almost all hemophiliacs in North America used pooled blood products from thousands of donors, so just about all of them died. (There's a Canadian film on Youtube that covers this.)
  - dghughes 6y ago
    >There's a Canadian film on Youtube that covers this. Yeah it was a major scandal here in Canada. The Red Cross lost the right to handle blood a new organization called Canadian Blood Services was created. Many people with hemophilia died but I think people at the tail end of it were around when the new drug cocktails slowed the disease. As a teen in the 80s AIDS was pretty scary even for a straight kid with no girlfriend. It seemed like everyone was talking about it, getting it, scared of people with it, or denying it existed. Anthony Fauci had a hard time getting Pres. Reagan to even take it seriously (sound familiar!?). Many conservatives saw it as the "gay disease" and dismissed it as irrelevant.

bluetwo 6y ago

Semi-related: Thinking about this era I wondered how long it look for AIDS to kill 100,000 Americans. The answer is about 5 years. CoViD did it in 5 months.

sn41 6y ago
It's disturbing that we are being told to learn to live with the virus when there is such a high risk of contraction.
- CyberDildonics 6y ago
  As opposed to what exactly?
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  Insofar as you are being told this, the reason you are being told is the high risk of contraction.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  High risk but most infected have close to no symptoms which is nothing like AIDS which used to be a death sentence.
  - ImaCake 6y ago
    But even a tiny mortality rate is catastrophic when talking about city and country sized populations. The lockdowns happened for a reason, because this disease overwhelms public health.
    - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      And if enough people start dying the disease overwhelms public everything. In the UK, some schools are refusing to reopen and some people are refusing to return to work in spite of government orders.

interestica 6y ago

"When AIDS was funny" https://youtu.be/yAzDn7tE1lU https://youtu.be/yAzDn7tE1lU It shows the challenges of the press to have serious conversations about the disease with the Reagan administration.

MiroF 6y ago
This makes my blood boil.
kazinator 6y ago
Anally-Inflicted Death Sentence! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jvVsf789y8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jvVsf789y8
Fezzik 6y ago
Is it that much different than how everyone jokes about HSV1 today? It is still a (ridiculous and stupid) running punchline on SNL. Obviously it is a far less dire virus (as far as we know, today) but, we as a species (generally) compared to our individual potential, are absolute idiots and almost always take the easy intellectual route (humor and bullshit) when faced with uncommon information. The video really seems like par for the course and not surprising in the slightest...
- umanwizard 6y ago
  “far less dire” is an understatement. HSV-1 causes only cosmetic effects in the vast majority of cases.
  - Fezzik 6y ago
    That is... not exactly true: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/06/21/621908340/researchers-find-herpes-viruses-in-brains-marked-by-alzheimers-disease https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/06/21/6219083... I was not trying to diminish the atrocity that is how the AIDS epidemic was handled, I was only trying to illuminate that people (and the super-majority of our lawmakers) are immature and uninformed when talking about all infectious diseases. Edit: just look at our President’s response to Covid... it is bumbling and moronic.

at_a_remove 6y ago

I remember how little was known in the beginning, when it was called GRID. For a while it was theorized in the media that semen hitting the bloodstream was causing the immune system to freak out; my friends, who had just started puberty, asked me (as the designated science nerd) what I thought of that, as they had somewhat random scenarios of nocturnal emissions striking road rash from skateboarding. I thought it unlikely, given what I knew of history. We had very little idea of what constituted "transmissible" and what did not for a period of time, and so while our parents had "free love" and The Pill, with the biggest risk being herpes, at least a section of my generation got "sex = death" internalized on top of all of the other apocalyptic gloom. Of course, even what would be transmissible was subject to propaganda: on one side, you had people arguing for any gay sex being a risk, but on the other side, some activists insisted that heterosexual intercourse was exactly and precisely as risky as homosexual (male) intercourse. Quite a lot of misinformation floating around.

ngold 6y ago
Grew up at the tale end of that, during reagan 80's. Learned how to hide under a desk for nukes. Hide under a doorframe for quakes. But Ghostbusters was good.
koheripbal 6y ago
There are still a lot people spreading the misinformation that hetero sex is as risky as anal sex, because they have some odd agenda to push.
- NelsonMinar 6y ago
  You understand heterosexual people have anal sex too, right? It's become quite trendy.
  - bagacrap 6y ago
    s/hetero/vanilla and the point stands
  - at_a_remove 6y ago

gjkood 6y ago

If you have time I would recommend two movies that touches deeply upon this topic. They are 'Philadelphia'[1] which garnered a 'Best Actor' Oscar for Tom Hanks and 'And the band played on'[2] starring Mathew Modine. 'Philadelphia' a fictional movie that touches on the social stigma associated with HIV and 'And the band played on' captures the politics of why it was ignored by Reagan and his supporters for so long and the sad politics and scientific infighting in the chase for a cure. Both are incredible movies. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107818/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_3 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107818/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_3 [2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106273/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106273/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

rurban 6y ago
A much more interesting Aids movie is Cold Case Hammerskjöld, which could explain the discrepancy of existence of the virus in these early samples. Highly controversial though. https://youtu.be/ZrUkRs8wDo0 https://youtu.be/ZrUkRs8wDo0
jdm2212 6y ago
Both are really incredible movies, and I'd also highly recommend them. "How To Survive A Plague" is pretty great too (it even features everyone's favorite NIH official, Anthony Fauci!). One thing worth being aware of with "And The Band Played On": it's quite old, and science advanced a lot after the book it's based on was written, so it's sometimes factually inaccurate (Gaetan Dugas didn't personally cause the pandemic, and the incubation period is longer than they thought then). It's not a work of history or a documentary, but it makes for fascinating viewing precisely because it was made so close to the events that the story it tells is not neat and polished with the benefit of decades of hindsight and narrative shaping. It's chaotic and emotional and raw and authentic and, inevitably, sometimes wrong about stuff that wasn't known then.
- overkill28 6y ago
  The Gaetan Dugas thing seems to dominate every discussion about And The Band Plays on which is too bad because the book is like 600 pages long, tracks dozens of real life individuals, has tons of incredible primary source material, and gives a very touching, grounded, contemporary look at AIDS in the early 80s. And out of the small portion of the book that talks about Dugas, I never got the impression that Schilts was trying the blame him for causing the pandemic, but rather that he was using him as a real life example of the type of man that existed in that era, who flew around the country having sex with thousands (yes thousands) of other men, whose behavior doubtlessly and unknowingly sped the spread of AIDS.

ddingus 6y ago

https://youtu.be/0KthBMpST7Q https://youtu.be/0KthBMpST7Q A 90's film telling the story of how AIDS was ignored.

ImaCake 6y ago

People might be interested in why this useful. Much like with Covid today, scientists are interested in understanding when the disease first appeared. Because that gives us clues about where it came from and how quickly it is changing now. You can estimate this based on changes in the sequence of the genome. Changes (mutations) will appear in the genome at a predictable rate ("mutation rate"), and is measured as mutations per generation. For HIV, there are plenty of estimates for the mutation rate based off a mixture of statistical bioinformatics and knowledge of genetics. But they are all inferences because we don't have many sequences from before 1988. This relatively ancient genome allows scientists to see how good their estimates are by looking at a genome that will have -20 years worth of mutations. Turns out the estimates are really good. I would then draw the link back to Covid where the mutation rate is estimated in the same way. So it's a good bet that the date estimated for Covid's emergence is pretty close to the mark. You can see the paper here[0]. I think the actual paper would make a better link on HN, but I guess the press release is useful for those without a molecular biology background. 0. https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/05/18/1913682117 https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/05/18/1913682117

acqq 6y ago
It's also relevant to demonstrate now that this virus too hasn't been made in the lab. The "lab origin" is a claim that some like to spread on every outbreak, even in spite of the fact that virologists know that nature produces the viruses very easily and there are no facts supporting anything else this time too. From the abstract: "Our phylogenetic analyses date the origin of the pandemic lineage of HIV-1 to a time period around the turn of the 20th century (1881 to 1918)." At that time humanity didn't even know what the virus really is -- they just knew that something in some liquid transmits some illness. The most advanced lab at that time could only get that liquid using the filters.
- simias 6y ago
  It's pointless to try to prove anything to conspiracionists, they'll just tweak their stories and continue as if nothing happened. Anything that goes against their narrative is ignored and quickly forgotten, anything that appears to remotely vaguely confirm their beliefs is amplified and repeated ad nauseam. Don't waste your time with them. You cannot reason people out of something they were not reasoned into.

joyj2nd 6y ago

TLDR: The "news" is not the age of the samples, there are older ones, but that the virus genome is still intact and allows for a more accurate estimation of mutation rates and origins of HIV. "There are older fragments of HIV out there, one from 1959 and one from 1960, also from DRC. But those pieces aren't as complete, and thus can't offer as much information about the virus' mutations. "

temptemptemp111 6y ago

The same is true of the "novel" corona virus. The only novel thing about it is the fiction they wrote.

masklinn 6y ago

> Those fragments were also from different subtypes of HIV, Gryseels said, which shows that the virus had been circulating for some time in humans before the 1950s. That was already pretty much a certainty from the already known fragmentary genomes (also mostly from the DRC), as well as the phylogenetic analysis of known strains, groups and subtypes.

koheripbal 6y ago
Was this restricted to Africa?
- masklinn 6y ago
  Looks so. The virus seems to have "brewed" in the Congo basin for a few decades, possibly amplified by the vaccination campaigns of the early 20th century (as they'd be using the same glass syringes and steel needles for dozens of patients). If it got out before the second half of the 20th century it apparently didn't manage to gain enough of a foothold to go pandemic[0]. Though the long incubation rate and somewhat mixed symptoms also make it somewhat uncertain. [0] as may have been the case for Robert Rayford who looks to have been something of a terminal case rather than vector or victim of a more widespread infection
  - Engineering-MD 6y ago
    I’m skepticism that vaccinations would have increased it much tbh. A needle stick from a patient with HIV has a 1/300 chance of transmitting HIV, so it would probably have had a very limited impact. Needle sharing amongst IVDUs is higher risk due to the repeated exposure to the small risk.

williesleg 6y ago

Interesting, from China.