Since the discovery of AIDS in 1981, AIDS has been raging around the world for the past 41 years and has become a major public health and social problem, which has attracted the attention of the World Health Organization (WHO) and governments of various countries. Various theories have emerged about its origin. The most widespread theory is that it was contacted by people who hunted or ate infected chimpanzees. Researchers place the origin of the virus in humans around 1930 based on scientific estimates of the time it would take for different strains of HIV to evolve.
But how the disease was able to cross the species barrier remains unknown.
Today, AIDS is a global pandemic that affects every country in the world. In 2006, an estimated 39.5 million people have had HIV/AIDS. Of these, nearly three million have died.
The region most affected by the disease is sub-Saharan Africa, where two-thirds of all HIV cases and almost 75% of AIDS death occur. Infection rates vary but it is southern African countries that are most affected.
In South Africa, an estimated 29% of pregnant women have HIV. The infection rate in the adult population of Zimbabwe is over 20% while in Swaziland one-third of the adult population is HIV positive. Among the main causes of this AIDS nightmare in Africa have been highlighted poverty, promiscuity, and inadequate health and educational systems.
AIDS ORIGIN THEORIES
Many of these theories have been rejected for not having a scientific basis: until now only two hypotheses circulate. The two parts of the origin of HIV, which is now generally accepted, that the virus has had its origin is the SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus), transmitted to man by the chimpanzee.
A group of scientists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory New Mexico has traced the origin of the virus that causes AIDS using a sophisticated computer, capable of making billions of mathematical combinations, they have been able to recompose the mutations that HIV has suffered and calculate when he went from a chimpanzee to a man for the first time. The result is that HIV originated in 1930 somewhere in central Africa. The first known case of the HIV virus in Africa dates back to 1959, in the blood stored in a laboratory of a male individual from Congo.
The most criticized hypothesis is the one that refers to HIV being introduced into the human population through medical science. Within this hypothesis, there are different theories.
The virus was allegedly introduced to humans from studies of polio vaccines conducted in Africa during the 1950s. according to scientists supporting this theory, transmission to humans began when chimpanzee kidneys were used to prepare the polio vaccine. A theory that others consider unbelievable; according to the studies, it would have been necessary for at least nine different viruses to have been inoculated into man through these vaccines.
Another theory highlights that HIV was released by Hepatitis B (HB) vaccines, partially developed in chimpanzees and used tactically in some population groups. These findings scientifically explain, for the first time, how SIV in chimpanzees, closely related to HIV, suddenly and simultaneously jumped from species to humans on two distant continents: Africa and the United States.
The four lots of HB vaccines, believed to be contaminated with genetic sequences common to HIV, were injected into people living in New York City and central Africa. According to some researchers, this could better explain how and why a sudden, simultaneous outbreak of at least four major strains of HIV occurred, on two distant continents, in two demographically different populations.
An epidemiological study carried out by a team of researchers from the IRD (Institute for Research for Development) in Montpellier, France, reveals the massive variability of viral strains circulating in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire).
These results confirm that the virus has been present for a long time in this region and that Central Africa could indeed be the epicenter of the pandemic. This study questions the controversial hypothesis of HIV I transmission to man as a result of a polio vaccination campaign launched in Zaire in the early 1960s: man was a carrier of the viral strain that caused the pandemic long before its dates.
The second theory is that of “Early Transmission” and maintains that the virus could have been transmitted to humans in the early 20th century or even in the late 19th century, through the hunting of chimpanzees for food.
The virus was able to remain isolated in a small, local population until around 1930 when it began to spread to other human populations and to spread. In this case, its expansion was favored by the socio-economic and political development of the African continent.
The simian virus is believed to have spread from chimpanzees to humans on at least three separate occasions, perhaps through killing the animals and eating their meat.......
Completer article on Origin of AIDS
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