HIV remains one of the worst medical problems on a global scale. According to some estimates, since the beginning of the epidemic, which was dated 1981, 78 million people were newly infected with HIV and 35 million have died from diseases associated with AIDS. Now these figures need to be revised and additions.
researchers from the University of Arizona (University of Arizona) and Cambridge in the UK (University of Cambridge) showed convincingly that the first victims of HIV appeared in North America much earlier. New article published October 26 in Nature.
New chronology
Traditionally, the start date of the epidemic was considered on 5 June 1981.
on this day, the Centers for control and prevention of diseases of United States (The U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC) has published the weekly report on morbidity and mortality, which included five cases of rare infections in young men with broken immune system. A year later came the name “acquired immunodeficiency Syndrome” (AIDS).
Now, thanks to a group of scientists led by Michael Sparrow (Michael Worobey) and Richard Mackay (Richard McKay), it is safe to say that HIV began to spread in America much earlier, around 1970. Using specially developed technology, the researchers built an evolutionary tree of different HIV strains and their spread in the United States.
it Turned out that the ancestor of all the strains of HIV in America is subtype B from Haiti. Before that, the virus crossed the Atlantic and arrived in the Caribbean in the 60-ies of Africa from their homeland.
the authors of the new publication was even able to determine the geographic location of the North American continent, where, most likely, the first HIV-infected person in the United States. This place was new York. “Around 1970 we see a signal about the appearance of this virus, and it is proof that in that time there must be at least one person [infected with HIV], says Sparrow. — From the Big Apple to HIV spread in San Francisco, and apparently in other cities in California such as in Los Angeles, where was the patients report of 1981″.
“Our analysis shows, continues the Sparrow, that numerous cases in California that has forced people to sound the alarm and eventually led to the discovery of AIDS,
in fact, there was only flashes of the earlier outbreaks that we see in new York.”
Who is to blame?
One of the defendants in the first publications of the CDC in the 80s was Gaetan Dugas (Gaëtan Dugas) — flight attendant at Air Canada, whose numerous homosexual relationships and “help” to find out that HIV can be transmitted sexually. He was dubbed “patient zero” with the implication that he was the first person who brought HIV in the United States. A new study has once again proved Dugas
of their results clearly shows that “patient zero” was someone before him.
furthermore, the researchers stressed that, as has been stated previously, the error occurred when typing in the printing: a flight attendant was called in the original work of the CDC as “patient O”, and not “patient 0″. The letter O was chosen because it begins with the phrase “Outside of California” — outside of California — and that marked Gaetan Dugas researchers from the CDC. In fact, its number in the manuscript was 057.
“Historians and researchers have long been refused recognition Dugas source of HIV infection in North America, says another study co-author Richard McKay from the UK. But when HIV was first discovered, researchers knowledge about him was limited, and the lighting in some of the media directed the public’s understanding of the epidemic in the wrong direction without a reliable scientific basis”.
New technology
Samples for analysis were in poor condition because they were taken from patients infected with HIV in the late 1970-ies, and viral RNA over time, destroyed. Because of this to learn the truth about the spread of HIV, the researchers had to develop under the project, special technology, called RNA jackhammering “molokootdelenia RNA”.
After a serological screening of more than 2000 serum samples of 40-year-old lab Sparrow and Mackay were able to recover 53 samples from eight complete sequences of viral RNA. After that, the researchers conducted a phylogenetic analysis and predicted by the mutation rate in RNA is that the first HIV
the common ancestor of the eight received the RNA was supposed to appear in the USA in 1970/71 year.
“Although the samples date from the late 1970-ies, a time long before noticed AIDS [them] so much genetic diversity — so many that it could not appear in the late 1970-ies, — said a Sparrow. It is the direct evidence of years of virus circulation in the United States before HIV and AIDS in the end recognized”.
Sparrow is not the first deals with the problems of the spread of HIV across the planet. In 2008 “Газета.Ru” talked about his work, in which he argued that HIV was transmitted to people a century ago — much earlier than previously thought.
Now a group of scientists under the direction of Sparrow and Mackay optimistic: the results help to better understand the spread of the virus among the population and can therefore lead to the creation of more effective strategies to combat it. In addition, the technology used by scientists can be applied to solve other problems. For example, it can help to improve the screening of blood tests for cancer markers and viruses, including zika virus — new terrible epidemic of our time.
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