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About a quarter of a century ago, the Center for Disease Control released one of its regular Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports. It discussed the case of five young gay men suffering from a strange set of symptoms. The disease turned out to be AIDS. Since then, 25 million have died from AIDS, and 65 million people have been infected with the virus that causes AIDS. This virus is called HIV, standing for Human Immunodeficiency Virus.
Even after quarter-of-a-century, there are strange beliefs about AIDS.
A 2005 study examined the opinions and attitudes of African-Americans to HIV/AIDS. About half of them believed that not only is the cure to AIDS being withheld, but that HIV is an "artificial virus". More specifically, about 15% of them believed that HIV was created by the CIA, the reason being that the American government supposedly wanted to kill off the African-American population. In the same line of thinking, Dr. Wangari Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner said that HIV is "a tool to control Africans or the Black People designed by some evil-minded scientists".
But "Not so" say the scientists. There are a few reasons.
First, the molecular biologists have actually traced the origin of HIV-1 (more common and more deadly than HIV-2, the other virus that can cause AIDS). After decades of painstaking work, analyzing the genetic code of various relevant viruses that infect monkeys, chimpanzees and humans, the true picture is finally emerging. It relates to "bushmeat", the eating of wild animals. It also relates to viruses that have been infecting monkeys and chimps for thousands of years, and strangely, don’t really harm them.
The true origin of HIV began with two separate viruses that infected two separate species of monkeys. The monkeys were attacked and eaten by chimpanzees, who because of their size (up to 1.8 m), strength and clever organization into formidable teams, easily hunted down and ate the monkeys, while they were alive. There was lots of monkey blood splashed around, and occasional cuts to the chimpanzees, so the chimps became infected with both the viruses from the monkeys. Inside the chimps, the two monkey viruses mutated into one new virus – which did not make the chimps unwell. We call this new virus SIV, or Simian Immunodeficiency Virus. Somewhere between 1910 and 1950, a human hunted down and killed a chimp for "bushmeat". The chimp virus, the SIV, inside the chimp blood entered his body through cuts, infecting him, and then mutating into HIV. The genetic code in all of these viruses leaves a clear trail of the evolution that began with two separate monkey viruses, and ended up with HIV.
The second reason as why the CIA/KGB/ASIO did not make HIV is very straightforward – we couldn’t do it. We humans have developed the knowledge and technology to make a complete virus only in the last few years – the polio virus was made in 2002, and the influenza virus of 1918 that killed 50 million people was reconstructed in 2006. And yet we have a preserved blood sample, taken in 1959, that shows HIV was infecting people way back then. We definitely did not have the technology to make HIV back in 1959.
So why do people, especially black people, believe such a preposterous myth? Well, one very good reason is the well-documented Tuskegee Syphilis Study of Alabama. From 1932 to 1972, some 400 poor and mostly illiterate African-Americans with syphilis were studied to understand the natural course of the disease. But, when the simple cure of penicillin became available in 1947, it was deliberately not given to these people. The syphilis made their lives short and miserable, killing most of them with horrendous disabilities. Another reason is that the African Americans have suffered, at the hands of the ruling whites, three centuries of slavery followed by over a century of oppression. Why should they believe that things have changed?
But there is still the mystery of how the original virus infects, but does not really harm, monkeys and chimpanzees. Maybe understanding this mystery will reduce further deaths from AIDS...
© Karl S. Kruszelnicki Pty Ltd 2007.
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