HIV/AIDS Around Since 1900?

In the United States, it wasn’t until the early 1980s when HIV/AIDS began to come out as a force to be reckoned with. Fear of the unknown kept innocent infected children from going to public school with their peers. Those who had contracted the virus were treated with the same disdain as someone who had Bubonic plague. While AIDS is still a relatively new disease to the US, recent research has shown that HIV/AIDS actually has been around over 100 years, since 1900.

This new study has shown that the strain of HIV that is currently causing an epidemic across the globe actually had its start sometime between 1884 and 1924. Study findings point to the urbanization of Africa being the starting point for the AIDS epidemic. This is much older than the earlier estimate of 1930 as being the year that HIV/AIDS originated. Agreeing on the 1900 date actually makes much more sense to scientists since this is the time that cities really began to grow and thrive in west-central Africa which is where the HIV-1 strain has been said to have originated. Coupled with high-risk behaviors of that time, this would have been all it took for HIV to blossom.

Michael Worobey from the University of Arizona in Tucson led the study which was sponsored by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectioous Diseases. The research team studied multiple samples of tissue and discovered that the oldest sequence dated from 1960. This sample came from a man who lived in Kinshasa located in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This specific tissue sample coupled with other sequences was used to create probable histories and date ranges of this particular strain. Based on these particular projections, the researchers deduced that the strain probably emerged sometime close to the turn of the 20^th century.

Worobey is a professor at the UA and teaches about how infectious diseases evolve over time. His research focused on retrieving DNA and RNA which contained HIV from older specimens. His focus was on determining the exact time when the virus made its leap to the human species from chimpanzees. Woroby states, “Previous work on HIV sequencing had been done on frozen samples and there are only so many of those samples available. From that point on, the next oldest sequences that anyone has recovered are from the late 1970s and 1980s, the era when we knew about AIDS. Now for the first time we have been able to compare two relatively ancient HIV strains. That helped us to calibrate how quickly the virus evolved and make some really robust inferences about when it crossed into humans, how quickly the epidemic grew from that time and what factors allowed the virus to enter and become a successful human pathogen.” Worobey and his team plan on continuing this research by working with more tissue samples to determine a more exact date of HIV’s origination and a more thorough understanding of its history.