Advance in Quest for HIV Vaccine

[Senusret I]

Originally Posted by WaxOff

have they ever figured out what actually causes the infection? Not how it's spread, but how it's created?

For example, can two homosexual men that both test negative for it have all of the monogamous, unprotected sex they want without risk of infection? Can two intravenous drug users that both test negative share all of the needles they want, only between themselves, without the risk of infection?

The answer to the above is yes -- two negative people cannot "create" HIV. No one really knows with certainty how HIV came to be.

[FHwku]

CDC HIV/AIDS WTF

The earliest known case of infection with HIV-1 in a human was detected in a blood sample collected in 1959 from a man in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. (How he became infected is not known.) Genetic analysis of this blood sample suggested that HIV-1 may have stemmed from a single virus in the late 1940s or early 1950s.

We know that the virus has existed in the United States since at least the mid- to late 1970s. From 1979–1981 rare types of pneumonia, cancer, and other illnesses were being reported by doctors in Los Angeles and New York among a number of male patients who had sex with other men. These were conditions not usually found in people with healthy immune systems.

In 1982 public health officials began to use the term "acquired immunodeficiency syndrome," or AIDS, to describe the occurrences of opportunistic infections, Kaposi's sarcoma (a kind of cancer), and Pneumocystis jirovecii pneumonia in previously healthy people. Formal tracking (surveillance) of AIDS cases began that year in the United States.

In 1983, scientists discovered the virus that causes AIDS. The virus was at first named HTLV-III/LAV (human T-cell lymphotropic virus-type III/lymphadenopathy-associated virus) by an international scientific committee. This name was later changed to HIV (human immunodeficiency virus).

For many years scientists theorized as to the origins of HIV and how it appeared in the human population, most believing that HIV originated in other primates. Then in 1999, an international team of researchers reported that they had discovered the origins of HIV-1, the predominant strain of HIV in the developed world. A subspecies of chimpanzees native to west equatorial Africa had been identified as the original source of the virus. The researchers believe that HIV-1 was introduced into the human population when hunters became exposed to infected blood.

For more information on this discovery, visit the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases press release.

[Drolefille]

Originally Posted by Senusret I

The answer to the above is yes -- two negative people cannot "create" HIV. No one really knows with certainty how HIV came to be.

Exactly. And didn't they recently come out and say that "Patient zero" wasn't really patient zero?

[Senusret I]

Originally Posted by Drolefille

Exactly. And didn't they recently come out and say that "Patient zero" wasn't really patient zero?

That's a fact.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ga%C3%ABtan_Dugas

[Drolefille]

Originally Posted by Senusret I

That's a fact.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ga%C3%ABtan_Dugas

Ah thanks, I thought so.

/not even going to try and get into the origins