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Oldest 'nearly complete' HIV genome found in forgotten tissue sample from 1966

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Re: Oldest 'nearly complete' HIV genome found in forgotten tissue sample from 1966

#161

Post by inappropriately »

MiroF wrote: post #102
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source? I tried to find out this but couldn’t. Would help me make a compelling argument to a conservative friend.

I live in DC. We have voted overwhelmingly to fund needle exchanges and have one of the highest rates of HIV in the country. The republican congress intervened into our local budget to prohibit us from allocating any of our local tax dollars to needle exchanges. Apparently they ended this funding ban at some point, but I'm having trouble finding articles on when exactly this was - it seems like it is repeatedly lifte…

To your edit: the homophobic conservative bigots that infest this site don't want to hear the truth.

Re: Oldest 'nearly complete' HIV genome found in forgotten tissue sample from 1966

#162

Post by drewbug01 »

blfr wrote: post #145
ImaCake wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what HIV would have done if it hit before mass adoption of protective equipment for sex. I think it could have brought civilization to it's knees.

Before mass adoption of protective equipment for sex people had the social technology to deal with it: monogamy.

Alas, people have been promiscuous for all eternity. Even “monogamous” people cheat.

Re: Oldest 'nearly complete' HIV genome found in forgotten tissue sample from 1966

#163

Post by bobthemover »

ReptileMan wrote: post #127
JordanFarmer wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry... Trying to understand. Are you saying that all these little kids died of aids? How did they contract it? Most kids are 3 feet tall by age three or four. Also, why so many deaths in 2002? Very effective drugs had been widely available for a long time.

Kids got it trough birth/breastfeeding. Combine that with AK, 2002 - I would guess somewhere in the southern half of Africa. I guess that it was combination of medicine not being cheap and IIRC some political leaders in the region were downplaying HIV by that time.

Also corruption, ideology and ignorance.

https://www.politicsweb.co.za/news-and-analysis/the-virodene...

Re: Oldest 'nearly complete' HIV genome found in forgotten tissue sample from 1966

#164

Post by ImaCake »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #144
ImaCake wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But even a tiny mortality rate is catastrophic when talking about city and country sized populations. The lockdowns happened for a reason, because this disease overwhelms public health.

And if enough people start dying the disease overwhelms public everything. In the UK, some schools are refusing to reopen and some people are refusing to return to work in spite of government orders.

Indeed, mass panic is an under appreciated risk in the discourse in some countries. We may have the misfortune of discovering just what that looks like in the coming months.

Re: Oldest 'nearly complete' HIV genome found in forgotten tissue sample from 1966

#165

Post by cbnotfromthere »

acqq wrote: post #133
prox wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting you mention this, in the WP series Operation Infektion, one of the disinformation campaigns by the Soviet Union is placing an article in a small newspaper in India, wherein the claim is made HIV was made in a lab in the US.

I was referring to the same claims spread in the West, e.g.: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/03/16/historys-greates... "Based on the theories of Dr William Campbell Douglass, many believe that that HIV was genetically engineered" "William Campbell Douglass, M.D. Education: BS, University of Rochester, New York; MD, University of Miami School of Medicine; Graduate, U.S. Navy School of Aviation and Space Medicine…

"And "we know who" now spreads the disinformation about the COVID-19 virus (I won't intentionally mention him, he has too much fans here)."

What's the problem with mentioning Putin?

Re: Oldest 'nearly complete' HIV genome found in forgotten tissue sample from 1966

#166

Post by sawjet »

acqq wrote: post #133
prox wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting you mention this, in the WP series Operation Infektion, one of the disinformation campaigns by the Soviet Union is placing an article in a small newspaper in India, wherein the claim is made HIV was made in a lab in the US.

I was referring to the same claims spread in the West, e.g.: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/03/16/historys-greates... "Based on the theories of Dr William Campbell Douglass, many believe that that HIV was genetically engineered" "William Campbell Douglass, M.D. Education: BS, University of Rochester, New York; MD, University of Miami School of Medicine; Graduate, U.S. Navy School of Aviation and Space Medicine…

> And "we know who" now spreads the disinformation about the COVID-19 virus (I won't intentionally mention him, he has too much fans here).

Are you referring to President Xi?

Re: Oldest 'nearly complete' HIV genome found in forgotten tissue sample from 1966

#167

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

trhway wrote: post #141
rewoi wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is not really "was this particular one man made?", but "is it possible?" It is pretty obvious 1970ties technology was not advanced enough to pull this stunt. But times change.

the "gain-of-function" experiments - ie. increasing the deadliness and transmissibility of a virus - doesn't seem to require any meaningful technology, at least not the way it was done in the Wuhan labs to the coronavirus[1]. Such "improved" virus wouldn't look like a "lab made". In theory similar gain-of-function experiments could have resulted in the human transmissible HIV back then. [1] https://www.newsweek.com/d…

Those gain-of-function experiments were done at the University of North Carolina.

But we know for certain that SARS-CoV-2 was not created through gain-of-function experiments. It doesn't use any of the standard viral backbones used in such experiments, it has a receptor binding domain that computational chemistry algorithms would not have predicted to work (meaning that nature "invented" it, not scientists), and the virus contains seemingly random differences throughout its genome from all known viruses - that would not be the case for a lab-created virus.

The boring answer is the correct one: this virus evolved in nature, and then spilled over into the human population late last year.

Re: Oldest 'nearly complete' HIV genome found in forgotten tissue sample from 1966

#168

Post by koheripbal »

acqq wrote: post #119
ImaCake wrote: post #110

People might be interested in why this useful. Much like with Covid today, scientists are interested in understanding when the disease first appeared. Because that gives us clues about where it came from and how quickly it is changing now. You can estimate this based on changes in the sequence of the genome. Changes (mutations) will appear in the genome at a predictable rate ("mutation rate"), and is measured as muta…

It's also relevant to demonstrate now that this virus too hasn't been made in the lab. The "lab origin" is a claim that some like to spread on every outbreak, even in spite of the fact that virologists know that nature produces the viruses very easily and there are no facts supporting anything else this time too. From the abstract: "Our phylogenetic analyses date the origin of the pandemic lineage of HIV-1 to a time…

It's important not conflate two separate accusations "created in a lab" vs "escaped from a lab".

The two are different in likelihood by perhaps two orders of magnitude and one is malicious while the other not.

When we lump all accusations together and dismiss them all together based on their most radical claim, then we do ourselves a disservice.

While it's important to be fact based, it's also important to be investigate theories of greater likelihood.

Imagine a murder investigation where a detective won't interview suspects because there's no evidence against them. It becomes a catch-22.

Re: Oldest 'nearly complete' HIV genome found in forgotten tissue sample from 1966

#169

Post by koheripbal »

masklinn wrote: post #150

> Those fragments were also from different subtypes of HIV, Gryseels said, which shows that the virus had been circulating for some time in humans before the 1950s. That was already pretty much a certainty from the already known fragmentary genomes (also mostly from the DRC), as well as the phylogenetic analysis of known strains, groups and subtypes.

Was this restricted to Africa?

Re: Oldest 'nearly complete' HIV genome found in forgotten tissue sample from 1966

#170

Post by koheripbal »

at_a_remove wrote: post #94

I remember how little was known in the beginning, when it was called GRID. For a while it was theorized in the media that semen hitting the bloodstream was causing the immune system to freak out; my friends, who had just started puberty, asked me (as the designated science nerd) what I thought of that, as they had somewhat random scenarios of nocturnal emissions striking road rash from skateboarding. I thought it unl…

There are still a lot people spreading the misinformation that hetero sex is as risky as anal sex, because they have some odd agenda to push.
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