How Technology Traced HIV to Its Very Beginnings

[n2doc]

In the early 1980s, when AIDS deaths began to ripple across the U.S. in force, most people—including healthcare professionals—had never even heard of the virus behind the outbreak. It was a distant infection on African continent. Few predicted it would explode into a pandemic that would baffle scientists into the 21st century.

Now, researchers are piecing together HIV's full origin story: how it went from a simian virus in chimps to a human one that has infected an estimated 75 million people worldwide. In a paper published today in the journal Science, researchers follow the first reported cases of HIV from Cameroon (which previous studies had suggested as the likely place that the virus jumped from chimps to humans) down the Sangha River to Kinshasa, now the capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

"Léopoldville (now Kinshasa) was at the very heart of the development of the pandemic," says Jacques Pépin, an epidemiologist at the University of Sherbrooke in Canada and coauthor on the paper. "That is where the virus was amplified to the extent that it eventually spread from there to the rest of the world."

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http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/genetics/how-tech-traced-hiv-to-its-beginnings-17270225

[underpants]

1. 1920- I had no idea

Thanks for posting. Growing up in the 80s the common refrain/joke was about sex with a monkey. After reading this I would guess that a intravenous drug user in a coal mining town ate an infected monkey. Just a guess.

[macllyr]

2. What about the Congo Free State ?

Well this is not the first study to trace the date of HIV adaptation to humans to the beginning of the 20th century :

Yusim K, Peeters M, Pybus OG, Bhattacharya T, Delaporte E, Mulanga C, Muldoon
M, Theiler J, Korber B. Using human immunodeficiency virus type 1 sequences to
infer historical features of the acquired immune deficiency syndrome epidemic and
human immunodeficiency virus evolution. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2001
Jun 29;356(1410):855-66.

Science. 2000 Jun 9;288(5472):1789-96.
Timing the ancestor of the HIV-1 pandemic strains.
Korber B(1), Muldoon M, Theiler J, Gao F, Gupta R, Lapedes A, Hahn BH, Wolinsky
S, Bhattacharya T. Timing the ancestor of the HIV-1 pandemic strains.

HIV-1 sequences were analyzed to estimate the timing of the ancestral sequence of
the main group of HIV-1, the strains responsible for the AIDS pandemic. Using
parallel supercomputers and assuming a constant rate of evolution, we applied
maximum-likelihood phylogenetic methods to unprecedented amounts of data for this
calculation. We validated our approach by correctly estimating the timing of two
historically documented points. Using a comprehensive full-length envelope
sequence alignment, we estimated the date of the last common ancestor of the main
group of HIV-1 to be 1931 (1915-41). Analysis of a gag gene alignment, subregions
of envelope including additional sequences, and a method that relaxed the
assumption of a strict molecular clock also supported these results.

However I am surprised that no scientist has discussed yet the role that the humanitarian disaster in the "Free Congo State" could have played between 1890 and 1908...

Mac L'lyr