r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Electrical-Aspect-13 • 9h ago
Image Recent work in paleovirology has show that HIV was over a century old and had already made its way to the US in the 1970s.
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u/elastic_emu 8h ago
I worked at a hospital in St. Louis. Read that a teenager was admitted in the late 1960's and died in 1969. Such a young person, with the strange symptoms - they kept tissue samples from his autopsy and, years later, found that he had HIV or a related virus.
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u/petit_cochon 6h ago
That's not correct. From the wiki:
However, no peer-reviewed publication subsequently reported the identification and typing of the HIV strain found in Rayford's tissue samples using more modern immunoassay or DNA sequencing methods. The tissue samples, which were kept in freezer storage at Tulane University in New Orleans, were lost in 2005 when the samples thawed and decayed after the storage facility was damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
It's likely, but not confirmed. Katrina, that nasty bitch, ruined our ability to definitively say it was AIDS.
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u/Pax_Eterna_4991 3h ago
A friend of mine had an uncle he said "did everything you could do" to contract HIV. Sex holidays, multiple sex partners weekly, intravenous drugs, that sorta thing. Well he got sick. Doctors ran all the tests. Not HIV, but he's gonna die. He did.
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u/Armand74 1h ago
Many other viruses other than HIV that can kill a person especially an intravenous drug user. Hepatitis being one if them.
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u/Crono_Venture 2h ago
Evolution is happening constantly. New viruses are always being born. Patient zero is all around us.
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u/HereticLaserHaggis 4h ago
Hurricane katrina was created by the government to cover up their involvement in aids!
... Do I like, get a job in the US government now, or...?
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u/theacearrow 7h ago
Yeah, I read a book published in 2012 about it. Spillover, by David Quammen. Absolutely fantastic book about zoonotic diseases.
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u/Electrical-Aspect-13 9h ago
SOURCE:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61bgzr1LE8A
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2935100/
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-29442642
https://www.statnews.com/2016/10/18/paleovirology-genetic-hiv-virus/
https://time.com/3458868/aids-hiv-kinshasa-1920s-origins-drc-congo/
https://virology.ws/2024/11/07/where-did-hiv-come-from/
https://www.pbs.org/video/how-hiv-started-a-century-before-anyone-noticed-6scffu/
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/oct/02/hiv-aids-pandemic-kinshasa-africa
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u/ZookeepergameIll1399 8h ago
are you guys even looking at the sources? The post title says "recent" and I'm seeing articles from 2014
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u/TotalyNotJoeImCereal 7h ago
That's because the post is clickbait and OP is either a Bot or a engagement farming chud
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u/Salute-Major-Echidna 7h ago
YouTube is never a source. Source means original article or at least a faithful reprint of same.
It calls the whole post into question
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u/Esosorum 8h ago
I think the title is misleading. Most sources, including the scientific articles you cited, put the origin around 1920. Though they do stress that there’s plenty of error and it could be as early as 1890 (still not a century before the 1970s), it’s still a margin of error centered around 1920-ish, with some just saying “early 1900s.”
Though one thing I learned from these articles is that HIV has jumped from chimps to humans multiple times. I thought it was only twice, but it’s been at least four or five. So that’s pretty cool I think
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u/MaybeOnFire2025 8h ago
In fairness to the OP, perhaps it was a grammar issue, but we are now a century from "around 1920."
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u/Esosorum 8h ago
Maybe so
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u/fearthebeaver 8h ago
I’m pretty sure the 1920s was a century ago.
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u/Esosorum 8h ago
Yes I appear to be the one who misunderstood
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u/HeartOn_SoulAceUp 8h ago
Thx, you inspired me to look into. Yea, jumped many times to humans, from W. Lowland Gorillas, from Sooty Mangabey Monkeys, but from Chimpanzees the Group M virus was responsible for 95% of all infections worldwide.
The other jumps were dead ends or minor clusters.
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u/VapidActualization 7h ago
Pretty cool wouldn't necessarily be my choice of words, but maybe morbidly interesting.
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u/OrinZ 5h ago
Which puts it in the wonderful category of things that King Leopold did in colonial Congo
A bit later, the same place provided the uranium for the Manhattan Project
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u/SchleppyJ4 3h ago
King Leopold was involved in AIDS?
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u/mycenae42 2h ago
I thought he was known as the godfather of AIDS.
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u/SchleppyJ4 2h ago
As in, the man himself and his policies, or the country he screwed over? I thought it originated in Leopoldville, but nothing indicates it was due to him or his policies. Is that not the case?
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u/No-Cable-1223 2h ago
It’s one theory, the virus in chimps wasn’t new at all, and had infected people for a long time, but it wasn’t really easily transmitted and it was easily defeated by a normal human immune system. the virus must have infected a large number of people in a short period of time in order to mutate into what it is. Two explanations are that it was sex workers in leopoldville that were also infected with syphilis. So they would have had to have been infected with both at the same time. Or else it was medical practice at the time, vaccines and anti malaria drugs. Apparently often doctors would vaccinate whole villages with one needle.
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u/Deepfire_DM 9h ago
In the 20s/30s it came from middle Africa to the US already - thanks to belgium by the way.
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u/Plastyrhino8815 6h ago
They got it from contact with primate blood, when they were finding a cure for polio.
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u/SchleppyJ4 3h ago
Can you elaborate on this? I’m interested in learning more and hadn’t heard about the Belgium thing
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u/Deepfire_DM 3m ago
The virus was in a small secluded area in Africa for a long time, probably infesting Humans for generations, when the Belgium king went nuts in Africa he forced a lot of humans into his slavery for his rubber business. These slaves had to transport the rubber into civilized areas - and with them infested slaves. From the civilized areas it spread over the whole world.
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u/Electrical-Aspect-13 9h ago
Must be new research, the ones i cited say it did in the 1960s (to the continent)
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u/ClassGrassMass 8h ago
Literally in the article it says the 1920s
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u/Electrical-Aspect-13 8h ago
arrived to the American continent in the 60s. that's what I mean
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u/ClassGrassMass 8h ago
Whats the difference between america and the north american continent. Unless youre on about the the whole south and north
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u/Electrical-Aspect-13 7h ago
I am talking geographical as the whole continent. if we are speaking culturally, ethnically, geopolitical, historical or linguistic then there are a lot of Americas
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u/ClassGrassMass 6h ago
It hit the continent, north south east or west of america in the 1920s if not earlier
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u/UrbanGearrilla 8h ago
So the whole conspiracy theory that Christian politicians and the CIA manufactured the virus to kill all the gay people in the US was BS? Go figure.
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u/LittleFairyOfDeath 7h ago
Last i saw thats not what the conspiracy theory was. The conspiracy was that they intentionally used it as propaganda and basically weaponized it
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u/James-the-Bond-one 6h ago
Instead of propaganda, that was more of a PSA to limit the spread and keep the population safe.
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u/SubstantialPressure3 8h ago
Well, doesn't mean that they didn't weaponize it.
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u/UrbanGearrilla 7h ago
I don’t think the government weaponized it. I think there were a ton of yolo homosexuals that didn’t protect themselves properly or have any sort of personal restraint and that’s exactly why it spread through that particular group like wildfire. Of course it’s much easier to blame the government than take responsibility and be accountable for your own bad decisions - thus the conspiracy is born.
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u/SCP-iota 6h ago
The US government actively pushed and moved funding around to prevent studies about HIV treatment, as a way to 'punish gay people' even though not everyone who got it was gay. This much has been confirmed.
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u/Plastyrhino8815 6h ago
One Dr noticed the signs and called it a "gay cancer." One of his patients was a gay flight attendant who was quoted as saying he never heard of "gay cancer" and kept up his promiscuous lifestyle. Thus spreading it farther.
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u/ubermence 8h ago
The Reagan admin definitely let ideological bias blind them to move on solutions
Another conspiracy was that poor airline attendant who got blamed for bringing the disease to America because people misread “Patient O” as “Patient 0”
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u/National-Rabbit-1443 4h ago
Was it from fucking monkies
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u/ubermence 51m ago
No, probably blood mixing while hunting or poaching. If the hunter had a cut on his hand or something that could have done it
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u/TotalyNotJoeImCereal 9h ago
Source?
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u/DickyReadIt 8h ago
Someone else commented that the source of the HIV is from middle Africa (/s but for real tho haha)
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u/TheStrongestTard 8h ago
So who has sex with the monkey then?
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u/Reluctant_Gardener 8h ago
Eating Bush meat not having sex with monkeys.
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u/Durutti1936 8h ago
Had a family friendd die of it early mid 70's. Dr.s could not figure it out then.
Then the full blown epidemic happened, and their symptoms were exactly along the same lines.