Others say HIV was created by Western intelligence agencies or began in the gay community in San Francisco in the 1970s. But tissue and blood samples kept by medical officials in Congo have been found to contain the virus in or around Kinshasa as early as 1959. And, recent research puts the birth of the virus in the forests of Cameroon to about a century ago.
A few years ago, University of Arizona epidemiologist Michael Worobey traced HIV to the beginning of the 20th century. He created a genetic family tree for the virus by comparing two 50-year-old lab samples found in the Congolese capital. Timberg explains they had similar genetic structures, linking them to a common ancestor.
"For quite some years, there has been a piece of historical virus from 1959 Kinshasa (Leopoldville) in some old blood samples. What Michael Worobey did," explained Timberg, " was dig up a second piece of historic virus from the biopsy of lymph nodes of a woman living in Kinshasa in 1960."
A man, who did not want to be identified, lies in a ward that specializes in the treatment of Aids at a hospital in Dakar, Senegal Thursday, Dec. 1, 2005.
A man, who did not want to be identified, lies in a ward that specializes in the treatment of Aids at a hospital in Dakar, Senegal Thursday, Dec. 1, 2005.
"Once you had two pieces of virus that old in the same basic time frame, you can then determine if they are very similar or not. He determined they were dissimilar enough that they could not be from [a recent] ancestor: in fact, to get the mutations they could see in the genome, it had to have been many decades earlier. The time frame he put together from his research was from sometime between 1884 and 1924 [for] a common ancestor, a common virus, in the Congo River Basin that was the grandfather of all of this."
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2013-11-25
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