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2007-05-22 22:50:51 · 2 answers · asked by Anonymous in Science & Mathematics Biology

2 answers

Researchers announced in May 2006 that the HIV virus most likely originated in wild chimpanzees in the southeastern rain forests of Cameroon (modern East Province) rather than in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), as had previously been believed. Seven years of research and 1,300 chimpanzee genetic samples led Dr. Beatrice Hahn of the University of Alabama, Birmingham, to identify chimpanzee communities near Cameroon's Sanaga River as the most likely originators. Presumably, someone in rural Cameroon was bitten by a chimp or was cut while butchering one and became infected with the ape virus. That person passed it to someone else..[1] Calculating based on a fixed mutation rate, the jump from chimpanzee to human likely occurred during the French colonial period (1919–1960). Comparative primatologist Jim Moore suggests that this may have been the result of colonial practices of forced labour, which could have suppressed the immune system of the initial hunter enough to allow the virus to infect and take hold. Likewise, forced immunisations (using one needle on many patients) may have sped the virus's spread through Cameroon and beyond.[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_origin#Possible_spread_from_animal_to_human_populations

2007-05-22 23:13:49 · answer #1 · answered by jsardi56 7 · 1 0

AIDS was first reported June 5, 1981, when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded a cluster of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (now still classified as PCP but known to be caused by Pneumocystis jirovecii) in five homosexual men in Los Angeles

Three of the earliest known instances of HIV infection are as follows:

A plasma sample taken in 1959 from an adult male living in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

HIV found in tissue samples from a 15 year old African-American teenager who died in St. Louis in 1969.

HIV found in tissue samples from a Norwegian sailor who died around 1976.

2007-05-23 06:47:16 · answer #2 · answered by paul13051956 3 · 1 1

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