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AIDS virus
came to US from Haiti in 1969, says study |
Posted
October 31, 2007
CHICAGO, USA (AFP): The strain of HIV that touched off the
US AIDS epidemic and fueled the global scourge of the
disease came to the continent from Africa via Haiti,
according to a study released Monday.
"Haiti was the stepping stone the virus took when it left
central Africa and started its sweep around the world," said
Michael Worobey, an assistant professor of evolutionary
biology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and senior
author of the paper. |
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The deadly virus
probably arrived on US shores in about 1969, more than a
decade before the full-blown US AIDS crisis of the 1980s,
and may have been carried there by a single Haitian
immigrant, according to the study.
"Once the virus got to the US, then it just moved
explosively around the world," Worobey said.
The finding confirms longstanding suspicions among some
scientists that the pathogen was imported from Haiti -- the
poorest nation in the western hemisphere, with a long
history of migration to the United States.
The timing suggests that it was more likely to have been a
Haitian immigrant or immigrants rather than US sex tourists
returning from Haiti, since it did not become a destination
for them until the 1970s, Worobey said.
The research also pegs the beginning of the US AIDS epidemic
to the late 1960s rather than the mid 1970s as was
previously assumed, and shows that the disaster was brewing
for a full 12 years before US public health authorities
realized they had an epidemic on their hands.
It wasn't until 1981 that the first US AIDS cases were
reported among homosexual men in Los Angeles by the US
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The strain of the virus that touched off the US epidemic
subsequently spread to Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan.
It was not clear previously how the virus got to the United
States from central Africa, where it first surfaced in
humans around 1930 after jumping species from chimpanzee to
man.
To solve the riddle, Worobey and a team of international
researchers conducted genetic analyses of archived blood
samples from early AIDS patients who migrated from Haiti to
the United States.
They used these analyses to make genetic family trees for
the virus, which they then compared to the genetic sequences
of AIDS patients from other countries.
Their calculations suggested there was a greater than 99
percent probability that the virus went from Africa to Haiti
to the United States.
The research ties in with other facts that pointed to Haiti
as the missing link in the chain of transmission.
Firstly, many Haitian professionals worked for a time in the
Democratic Republic of Congo after it achieved independence
from Belgium in 1960. It is one of several central African
nations where the disease has been established since the
1930s.
In the early days of the US outbreak, the rate of AIDS
infections among Haitians living in the United States was 27
times higher than that in the broader US population.
Worobey and his colleagues also concluded that the virus
jumped from Haiti to Trinidad and Tobago, causing the
predominantly heterosexual outbreak on those Caribbean
islands.
The AIDS problems on Haiti and Trinidad and Tobago were
therefore not started by North American sex tourists
visiting the islands in the 1970s or 1980s, as some
scientists had speculated.
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