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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

#201

Post by slim »

koheripbal wrote: post #170
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.

do you mean that vaginal sex is less risky than anal sex? Wikipedia says otherwise https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS#Transmission

do you have any source for what you believe?

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

#202

Post by djaque »

mmmBacon wrote: post #197
djaque wrote: post #3

I didn't understand the AIDS epidemic until I listened to a podcast [1] where they interviewed a gay survivor. I can't imagine my friends dying off one by one around me from an unknown specter. The government pretending you didn't exist and ignoring you because it was a "gay problem". Society demonizing you. He said that even after it was understood that AIDS was not transmissible by touch, morgues would refuse to ac…

My mother worked in a funeral home from about 1986 to 1997. I recall when they got their first AIDS victim in 1987. They took the body and I don’t recall my Mother freaking out about it. They realized that sooner or later they were going to get remains of someone who had died of AIDS. There were few protocols at the time regarding how to prepare bodies for viewing and I think they simply used common sense. I recall m…

I'm sure it varied quite a bit depending on where you were.

In the podcast, the interviewee talks about how in some major cities there was only one funeral home which would serve that population. Those places have now become the only place some gay men want to handle their body when they pass as a sign of appreciation for their compassion during the AIDS epidemic.

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

#203

Post by [deleted] »

dang wrote: post #125
longtom wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The notion of the "gay problem" does not come from nowhere though. Gays have extremely promiscuous lifestyles with 3.5 as many lifetime sex partners, resulting in a 60x higher rate of HIV infections[1], accounting for 67% of HIV diagnoses despite making up 2% of the population or so.[2] So gays are clearly massively responsible for the spreading of the virus and they could reduce its prevalence by engaging less in an…

If you keep posting flamebait to HN we will ban you again.

[deleted]

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

#204

Post by Engineering-MD »

masklinn wrote: post #187
koheripbal wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was this restricted to Africa?

Looks so. The virus seems to have "brewed" in the Congo basin for a few decades, possibly amplified by the vaccination campaigns of the early 20th century (as they'd be using the same glass syringes and steel needles for dozens of patients). If it got out before the second half of the 20th century it apparently didn't manage to gain enough of a foothold to go pandemic[0]. Though the long incubation rate and somewhat…

I’m skepticism that vaccinations would have increased it much tbh. A needle stick from a patient with HIV has a 1/300 chance of transmitting HIV, so it would probably have had a very limited impact. Needle sharing amongst IVDUs is higher risk due to the repeated exposure to the small risk.

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

#205

Post by trhway »

yters wrote: post #193
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting serial passage in the lab? The problem with that theory is that the virus contains thousands of mutations throughout its genome, which would take decades of evolution to accumulate. In the wild, this virus jumps to a new host every few days, meaning that decades of evolution amount to thousands of generations of virus. No lab has the time to pass virus through so many animals.

i dont understand why it would have to jump through a bunch of animals first. cant it go from bat to human? fauci was conducting coronavirus gain of function experiments in wuhan in 2019 trying to go from bat to human, so at least some scientists didn't consider the evolutionary distance to be so great UPDATE: newsweek article on fauci https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan...

>cant it go from bat to human?

That is the answer you get from the experiments, if it jumps then it can, if it doesn't jump, keep trying different strains and generations selectively bred in mice/ferrets/etc. (in addition to using human cells in vitro to filter the candidates at various stages, an interesting modern possibility is to use mice seeded with human cells with the receptors of target type like ACE2 in this case and/or with human cells from respiratory surfaces). In general it is like you'd selectively breed new type of apple or grain, condensing the decades of chaotic natural selection into managed selection over few years or even months when it comes to fast iterating objects like for example viruses and bacteria.

So far it looks like the experiments did succeed. China is a country where prison inmates voluntarily donate organs while still alive, and in general it sounds like their prisons are very harsh, comparable or even worse than for example in Russia. Compare to that getting infected with a flu and spending few weeks in a nice lab hospital being well fed and relieved from the hard labor and abuse by the guards and other prisoners - i suspect there would be a line to sign up for those experiments.

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

#206

Post by dang »

interestica wrote: post #16

"When AIDS was funny" https://youtu.be/yAzDn7tE1lU It shows the challenges of the press to have serious conversations about the disease with the Reagan administration.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23357730.

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

#207

Post by scottlocklin »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #188
scottlocklin wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your statement contradicted itself in several places: a "gain of function" virus would contain random differences, and would look indistinguishable from something "created by nature." Effectively that's how nature makes more virulent viruses; the more virulent examples reproduce more effectively. Just like that's how nature/bakeries makes yeast that works better on flour. No genetic engineering involved. I don't thin…

> a "gain of function" virus would contain random differences, and would look indistinguishable from something "created by nature." No, a chimeric virus created in a gain-of-function experiment would look extremely similar to known viruses, because these chimeras are created by combining elements of known viruses. It would not be 4% different from the closest known natural virus. Accumulating thousands of mutations t…

Yeah dude that could never happen. Except it already did:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/

https://norkinvirology.wordpress.com/2015/12/04/genetically-...

https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048

I don't know what your purpose is in regurgitating verifiable but admittedly realistic-sounding bullshit on hacker news, but virtually every statement you have made here is obvious bullshit.

I don't even particularly believe the "possibly released from a lab" meme, and am generally against the shadowy dipshits that push it. But you're not helping here.

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

#208

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

scottlocklin wrote: post #207
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a "gain of function" virus would contain random differences, and would look indistinguishable from something "created by nature." No, a chimeric virus created in a gain-of-function experiment would look extremely similar to known viruses, because these chimeras are created by combining elements of known viruses. It would not be 4% different from the closest known natural virus. Accumulating thousands of mutations t…

Yeah dude that could never happen. Except it already did: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/ https://norkinvirology.wordpress.com/2015/12/04/genetically-... https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048 I don't know what your purpose is in regurgitating verifiable but admittedly realistic-sounding bullshit on hacker news, but virtually every statement you have made here is obvious bullshit. I don't even…

What happened?

Are you saying that a chimeric virus created in a lab was found to have thousands of seemingly random mutations throughout its genome?

Or are you claiming that a chimeric virus was created using a backbone that nobody had ever heard of?

Be specific, because it's impossible to respond if you vaguely call what I'm saying BS.

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

#209

Post by emiliobumachar »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #192
emiliobumachar wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every conspiracionist beyond hope was once not quite beyond hope if you go back enough in time, and new ones are getting minted all the time and can still be saved. It's a worthy fight, even though it cannot be thoroughly won.

It has been argued that one saves people from going down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories not by giving them the right facts, but by ensuring that they do not feel alone and isolated in society. Speaking with Flat Earthers can reveal that they accepted Flat Earthism simply because it gave them some feeling of community with other people on the internet, and the belief in a flat Earth itself isn’t actually the p…

That's definitely more important, but more easily verifiable right facts help.

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

#210

Post by gumby »

arbitrage wrote: post #180
drewbug01 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respect your commitment to fighting bigotry, but I mean - those toilets can be pretty nasty. May as well use them, now that we have them. :)

Paper ass gaskets do not diminish transmission of any microbial contamination on a toilet seat. They exist solely for psychological benefit.

An excellent term that made me laugh out loud!
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