We were attending a 77th birthday party for the HIV/AIDS virus last night when one of the party guests dampened the mood considerably by informing us that our guest of honor was actually over 100 years old. And boy oh boy was AIDS pissed off about that!
Alright, alright that wasn’t very funny … the truth is, we were actually attending a pink ribbon event (or whatever color ribbon it is) to help raise money for AIDS research when we heard the news.
Except that’s not true either. Because the AIDS ribbon is red, not pink, and anybody involved in the fight against this awful disease knows that.
Anyway, here’s the latest update on what scientists are learning about “the Hiv” …
(A new) study, led by evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona in Tucson, puts the date of origin at around 1900, which is 30 years earlier than previous analyses.
HIV-1, the most common form of the virus, is known to have originated in chimpanzees because of close genetic similarities to a simian virus. It now infects an estimated 33 million people worldwide.
But figuring out when the virus jumped species and became established in humans has been difficult. The first cases in the U.S. were recognized in 1981, and the oldest evidence of the virus is a 1959 blood sample taken from a man who lived in what was then the Belgian Congo.
To find the point of origin, the scientists relied on a well-recognized genetic technique to determine the mutation rates of different sub-types of the virus. With a known rate of mutation, researchers could then, in essence, run the clock backward to find the point where the different sub-types were the same. That common ancestor would represent the first appearance of the virus in humans before it mutated.
What this discovery means is uncertain, but what is certain is that AIDS sucks and we would never go to its birthday party no matter how old it was.
