CURRENT EVENTS: HIV’S ROOTS TRACED TO 1930 Summary Scientists have concluded,
based on mathematical research, that the virus that lead to the epidemic of AIDS
can be traced all the way back to 1930, somewhere around Central Africa. Bette
Korber, of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, presented this
conclusion at the Conference of Retroviruses. The notion that HIV was introduced
in contaminated oral polio vaccines in Africa between the years of 1957 and 1961
has been often debated and challenged. The results presented by Korber, not only
refute the before mentioned allegations, but also move us toward finding out
where the virus really came from and in which direction it is heading in the
future. The first sample discovered in 1959 comes from a man in Congo, who died
as a member of the M class of HIV, the type that most people are infected with
today. However old the virus was, it was evident that it wasn’t the first of its
kind. The reason that the virus was ever connected to polio is because in the
same year of 1959, the introduction of oral polio vaccines, supposedly tested on
chimpanzees, came to the continent of Africa. However in reality, states Stanley
Plotkin of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, “the introduction of HIV in
chimpanzees occurred well before the polio vaccine.”
The machine used in the process of determination is the Los Alamos
Nirvana Machine, which is capable of making one trillion calculations per
second. After plugging in dates, formulas and locations, the Nirvana located the
origin of the HIV virus as being 1930, however the range of error shows that it
could have been anywhere from 1915 to 1942. The Nirvana was also able to
determine that the virus appeared in the Caribbean Islands such as Haiti, in the
1960’s, while it came to America more than ten years later. It is quite definite
that the virus came from chimpanzees in the area around Gabon, Cameroon, and the
Central African rainforest. It most probably passed onto the hunters while they
were butchering the animals. After that, the virus has taken on six different
strands, and is spread in humans mostly through sexual intercourse. Issue The
matter being discussed here is the AIDS epidemic.
AIDS and the HIV virus are
very real issues in the world and especially in America. Whether it is the
needle of the syringe of a junkie, a blood transfusion or the exchange of bodily
fluids, people are getting infected and dying every day with this disease, and
there is no remedy. Each day thousands of researchers scientists and
mathematicians try to go further, so that they might bring the world closer to a
cure. A lot of progress has been made, and as a result people are living ten,
fifteen, and even twenty years with AIDS. This article demonstrates to us that
developments are still being made, and we are slowly but surely approaching a
revolutionary discovery. Opinion It is very refreshing for me to read articles
of this kind. I see people dying of AIDS and it scares me to think that, if I am
not overly cautious, it could be me as well. The fact that we are making
progress such as this, where we now know that HIV really originated thirty years
before we presumed, is leading us to understand more about this epidemic. The
more we understand about where it came from, the better our chances of
understanding what caused it, and how to cure it. I realize that the discovery
of a vaccine is still far off, and there is a chance that there will never be a
complete cure. However, with each new scientific discovery, I have a renewed
hope in our civilization’s survival of the plague we commonly call AIDS.
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