If you thought AIDS was caused by gay men having sex in the 1980s, perhaps you need to read this startling new story from Nature.
And if you thought HIV came about in the 20th century, you might want to read this as well...
According to a version of the story published on HealthDay News (via Yahoo), it was the rise of urban centers around Africa's west-central region that saw the first cases of HIV outbreaks, sometime between 1884 and 1924. Scientists previously pinpointed 1930 as the year those outbreaks began in the sub-Saharan areas.
Michael Worobey, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary
biology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, said in a university news
release... "[F]or the first time, we have been able to compare two relatively
ancient HIV strains. That helped us to calibrate how quickly the virus
evolved and make some really robust inferences about when it crossed into
humans, how quickly the epidemic grew from that time and what factors
allowed the virus to enter and become a successful human pathogen."
HIV-1, one of the two species of the virus, is widely believed to have been transferred from primates to humans at the start of the outbreaks.
Via Yahoo.
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