AIDS Emerged 100 Years Ago, Study Says

New research pushes the emergence of HIV into the 19th Century, points to urbanization of Africa as a cause
By Stuart Fox Posted 10.01.2008 at 3:18 pm 3 Comments

Budding HIV: CDC

One can hardly fathom the horror of life in the Congo Free State during the turn of the last century when native Africans suffered genocide at the hand of Belgium’s King Leopold II. In those conditions, no one would have noticed people dying of a strange disease that would not be named for another hundred years. No one would have noticed people dying of AIDS.

However, a new study in the journal Nature places the emergence of HIV smack in the middle of that turbulent era, decades earlier than previous estimates for the evolution of the disease. While a 2006 paper showed HIV emerging in the 1930s, this new research has the disease showing up sometime between 1884 and 1924.

“[New samples] allowed us to push the date back to around 1908,” said Marlea Gemmel, a research specialist at the University of Arizona and one of the authors of the Nature paper, “the big difference in that new date is the social context. The rise of urban centers in Africa allowed the virus to spread instead of dying out.”

According to the University of Arizona team, HIV first gained a foothold in humans shortly after the city of Kinshasa, then called Leopoldville, was founded in 1881. In 1898, a new railway sparked massive growth in the city, drawing people from the countryside into the new city. The paper posits that one of those new urbanites brought HIV to the city, where it initially began to spread.

The study looked at a new sample of HIV infected tissue from Kinshasa that had been preserved since 1960. The researchers then compared that sample to the 1959 sample that had been used to generate the 1930 emergence date. By looking at the differences between the viruses in the two samples, the researchers determined that the disease must have been evolving for longer than anyone realized.

“There was already a lot of diversity in Kinshasa at the time,” said Gemmel “It’s not even more broad, it’s just in Kinshasa.”

Gemmel also added that the adverse conditions in the Congo at the time might have contributed to the spread of the disease, as people who are under stress are more susceptible to infection.

The study was a collaboration between American, European and African scientists who all research the origin of HIV. The research was possible because the older sample had been preserved in wax for over 40 years—a rare occurrence and one that has limited how much data has been collected on older strains of HIV. Nevertheless, scientists have hopes that more will emerge, shedding light on the origins of HIV.

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surfo2
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 10/01/08 at 11:48 pm

I am no medical expert but this story doesn't make any common sense to me.This seems like a wild theory , based on cell samples from the 60s that are then extrapolated back in time.Considering the strength of the pandemic , the rapidity of infection and clear late stage symptons how can they possibly say this disease lay dormant or goes back, 100 years?

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armando348
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 10/03/08 at 2:14 pm

I am very skeptical of this theory. The best origin of the AIDS virus theory so far is the TRUE story of a botched Polio vaccine attempt by the WISTAR institute of Philadelphia in the Congo (Camp Lindsey) during the late 1950's! It is very interesting that sample used comes from this period. Even more interesting is the lack of samples taken from this population in the Congo to this day, and the only person who attempted this died there.

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Mr.Reichart
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 10/06/08 at 5:03 pm

I have not read the Nature article, but this is most likely a DNA study. What they can do is compare the latest strains to those collected since it's public discovery in the late 70's and early 80's and now this one from the 1960's. This way they can plot what area's of it's genome have been changing and extrapolate that to it's first virulent strain.

Recall how the bird flu was first killing many birds, but then over time was spreading to humans in close contact. This is because certain parts of the virus changed making it possible for it to infect humans. It's statistics.

# infected
100,000,000'...............................................*
10,000,000 '..............................................*.
1,000,000 '.............................................*..
100,000 '...........................................*....
10,000 '.........................................*......
1,000 '.......................................*........
100 '....................................*...........
10 '................................*...............
1 '*...............................................
0 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
Year 1884 1960 1980 2008

It's tough to make an exponential graph out of periods, but you get the idea. It's all about observing the number of known cases over the years and extrapolating when it started.

It gets more complicated when you get into the actual DNA explanation. This has to do with phylogeny, or looking at other virus that are similar in DNA structure on specific regions of the HIV genome. These other strains are thought to be where the HIV strain originated from. The abstract online says that this 1960's strain gives more evidence that it is a relative to a particular type of monkey AIDS.

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