UA Study: HIV’s First US Foothold Was in 1970s

One of the difficulty in studying and treating HIV is that the virus is characterised by important genetic diversity and different strains exist around the world. With precise historic and genetic analysis, they have shown that the virus spread from the Caribbean to New York City before becoming widespread in the rest of the US.

The men were participating in a study of hepatitis B, which was prevalent in the gay community at the time.

“Some people may say that we knew this already, and in broad strokes, that’s true”, says Beatrice Hahn, from the Perelman School of Medicine, who studies the evolution of HIV.

Researchers looked for traces of antibodies that their immune systems would have produced to fight the infection.

But a study, in the journal Nature, showed he was just one of thousands of infected people in the 1970s. The virus mutates at a steady rate as it reproduces, allowing researchers to estimate its evolutionary family tree based on the changes observed in any particular strain.

The HIV virus is spread through the transmission of certain bodily fluids, primarily through sexual intercourse or sharing needles with an infected person.

It was a bit of a long shot.

But the researchers were persistent. But the new findings suggest that HIV in the tissues may not cause AIDS but could contribute to the development of unrelated conditions, such as cancer and heart disease, according to the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) researchers. If you have just a single time point – now – it’s hard to gauge the cactus’s age.

HIV evolved from a virus in sub-Saharan Africa that was infecting primates, which is believed to have begun infecting humans in the early 1900s.

Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo was seen as the city that started the global pandemic.

He and colleagues put the first introduction of the virus – subtype B of group M of HIV-1 – in the early 1970s.

An air steward posthumously labelled “Patient Zero“, who was notoriously blamed for starting the Aids epidemic in the United States in the 1980s, has been exonerated in a new study.

By extracting viral DNA from more than 2,000 blood samples collected from United States men in 1978 and 1979, the scientists showed that HIV already displayed a high level of genetic diversity in the 1970s.

Furthermore, the NY city genomes show important genetic diversity compared with the San Francisco genomes.

Also, insights gained from the study may help improve knowledge about how pathogens move through populations and lead to more effective ways to control or eradicate risky germs, according to the researchers.

“It always helps to nail it”, she said.

Thousands of people were already infected in the U.S.by the time Dugan, the so-called “patient zero“, came to the United States, the study concluded. The present study confirms that no genetic nor historic evidence supports the theory that Dugas introduced HIV in the US.

The book spurred many sensational takes about the highly feared and poorly understood epidemic. They sequenced HIV genomes from patient blood samples and examined how the virus mutated over time. The legend of Dugas’ culpability for the disease persists to this day – even though he was just one of its many early victims, said Richard McKay, a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at Cambirdge’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

The designation was used because Dugas was from “Out (side)-of-California”. William Darrow, one of the CDC investigators involved in the earlier HIV cluster study, has stated that the agency’s records of Dugas referred to him as “patient O“-the letter O, meant to abbreviate the patient’s “Out [side]-of-California” residential status in order to distinguish him in their records-yet somehow that title eventually evolved within the CDC to become the numerical “Patient 0”.

Dugas was the subject of the 1987 book “And the Band Played On” written by journalist Randy Shilts, who got HIV and died in 1994.

Dugas, who worked for Air Canada, reported having about 250 sexual partners a year. The New York Post even ran a picture of him under the headline “The Man Who Gave Us AIDS”. “Earlier detection and better alignment of the various options we have to make it harder for the virus to move from one person to the next are key to driving HIV out of business”. The city was the crucial hub from which the virus spread across the continent, including to San Francisco, they said.