[BRIEF NOTE] HIV in 1884?

[rfmcdonald]

The below interesting new item on the genesis of HIV/AIDS comes ultimately from Nature.

A biopsy taken from an African woman nearly 50 years ago contains traces of the HIV genome, researchers have found. Analysis of sequences from the newly discovered sample suggests that the virus has been plaguing humans for almost a century.

Although AIDS was not recognized until the 1980s, HIV was infecting humans well before then. Researchers hope that by studying the origin and evolution of HIV, they can learn more about how the virus made the leap from chimpanzees to humans, and work out how best to design a vaccine to fight it.

In 1998, researchers reported the isolation of HIV-1 sequences from a blood sample taken in 1959 from a Bantu male living in Léopoldville — now Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Analysis of that sample and others suggested that HIV-1 originates from sometime between 1915 and 1941.

Now, researchers report in Nature that they have uncovered another historic sample, collected in 1960 from a woman who also lived in Léopoldville.

It took evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona in Tucson and his colleagues eight years of searching for suitable tissue collections originating in Africa before they tracked down the 1960 lymph node biopsy at the University of Kinshasa.

The samples had all been treated with harsh chemicals, embedded in paraffin wax and left at room temperature for decades. The acidic chemicals had broken the genome up into small fragments. Formalin, a chemical used to prepare samples for microscopy, had crosslinked nucleic acids with protein. "It's as if you had a nice pearl necklace of DNA and RNA and protein and you clumped it together, drenched it in glue and then dried it out," says Worobey.

The team worked out a combination of methods that would allow them to sequence DNA and RNA from the samples; another lab at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, confirmed the results, also finding traces of the HIV-1 genome in the lymph node biopsy.

Using a database of HIV-1 sequences and an estimate of the rate at which these sequences change over time, the researchers modelled when HIV-1 first surfaced. Their results showed that the most likely date for HIV's emergence was about 1908, when Léopoldville was emerging as a centre for trade.

Although that date will not surprise most HIV researchers, the new data should help persuade those who were unconvinced by the 1959 sample, says Beatrice Hahn, an HIV researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

1884 is the earliest date that Worobey gives for HIV's emergence as an infectious virus among humans. What happened in the year after 1884, 1885? That's when the ever so shiny and happy Congo Free State was established in 1885. I don't think I'm alone in wondering whether the terrible sufferings and mass displacements of Congolese and other central African populations under European rule--the Germans in Cameroon, the French in Congo-Brazzaville, an unholy international conglomerate in the Congo Free State--might have had something to do with the virus' emergence.

We already knew that colonialism kills. It turns out that it can do so in rather unexpected ways, too.