AIDS virus invaded U.S. from Haiti

[Diego_Ryan]

Not exactly. A cure would be no disease. Heart transplant patients have to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of their lives. You've just replaced one disease with a lesser one.

I assume when organ cloning or stem cell use is allowed that will no longer be a problem?

Actually, the disease is known to have been in St. Louis in the early 1960s. A St. Louis boy died then under such strange circumstances, and with such bizarre symptoms, that the doctors caring for him at the time were baffled. They saved some tissue samples in a freezer. Years later, when the AIDS epidemic broke, one of the doctors thought the symptoms of AIDS sounded like that weird St. Louis case he remembered from years before. He managed to locate the still-frozen tissue samples from the boy. They were HIV+

This would seem to argue against the Haitian immigrant as the single source of US infections, but not necessarily. The DNA evidence for a single Haitian immigrant infecting most of the US is rather compelling. There have probably been several incursions of the virus into the US, many of which petered out.

Ah! Yes, I remember now. Also didn't they make a film about this? I wonder how the boy got the disease. Blood transfusion? But if that was the case why did people start getting six almost 2 decades later? Perhaps the kid traveled to a foreign country? In Europe the first AIDS cases were in people who had lived in Africa for a time.

 

[Centurion]

Actually, the disease is known to have been in St. Louis in the early 1960s. A St. Louis boy died then under such strange circumstances, and with such bizarre symptoms, that the doctors caring for him at the time were baffled. They saved some tissue samples in a freezer. Years later, when the AIDS epidemic broke, one of the doctors thought the symptoms of AIDS sounded like that weird St. Louis case he remembered from years before. He managed to locate the still-frozen tissue samples from the boy. They were HIV+

This would seem to argue against the Haitian immigrant as the single source of US infections, but not necessarily. The DNA evidence for a single Haitian immigrant infecting most of the US is rather compelling. There have probably been several incursions of the virus into the US, many of which petered out.

This is true, and I agree with the conclusion. The year the kid died was actually 1969. I don't think it really changes anything, though, since it seems a bit of a stretch for a Haitian immigrant to make it to St. Louis, infect somebody, and have that infected person die, all in the same year the immigrant supposedly arrived in the US. The "kid" was 18 years old, and he is known in the medical literature as "Robert R."

Also, it's interesting that a man died in New York in 1959 of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. The man had lived in New York for several years, and he was a Haitian immigrant! As I implied in my earlier post, I think our entire understanding of the time line of the spread of the AIDS epidemic needs to be shifted decades earlier than we currently describe. I'll bet the founder case actually came into the US in the 1940s. Possibly early 1950s. That's probably time enough for it to reach St. Louis by the 1960s.

 

[backpacker]

Very interesting. Thanks for posting. I like to see these type of posts on JUB.

 

[Centurion]

Ah! Yes, I remember now. Also didn't they make a film about this? I wonder how the boy got the disease. Blood transfusion? But if that was the case why did people start getting six almost 2 decades later? Perhaps the kid traveled to a foreign country? In Europe the first AIDS cases were in people who had lived in Africa for a time.

I don't know if they made a film about it, but I do know that Robert R. is known never to have been outside of the United States.

And I don't know how he got it.

Two decades is not at all unusual for the "outbreak". Epidemics are often logarithmic. They begin with almost no cases for a long while, then the rate of infection increases ever more rapidly once a "critical mass" of cases occurs. Because AIDS develops so slowly clinically as an infection (people have the virus for years before the first symptoms appear), the initial slow development of the epidemic was probably on the order of decades. It would not surprise me greatly if AIDS was present in the US even in the 1930s, although that's a bit of a stretch. That's why I believe it is somewhat older than is generally claimed in the literature.

 

[Diego_Ryan]

I don't know if they made a film about it, but I do know that Robert R. is known never to have been outside of the United States.

And I don't know how he got it.

Two decades is not at all unusual for the "outbreak". Epidemics are often logarithmic. They begin with almost no cases for a long while, then the rate of infection increases ever more rapidly once a "critical mass" of cases occurs. Because AIDS develops so slowly clinically as an infection (people have the virus for years before the first symptoms appear), the initial slow development of the epidemic was probably on the order of decades. It would not surprise me if AIDS was present in the US even in the 1930s. That's why I believe it is somewhat older than is generally claimed in the literature.

But then why did it kill those in the 80s and 90s so much faster? Some people would develop it 5 years after exposure. Don't you think strange illnesses would have been reported if it had appeared in the 1930s?

 

[Centurion]

The problem with the 1930s is so many cases would not have been under the care of a doctor until the patient was near death. And since AIDS itself doesn't really kill you, the pneumonias and cancers it caused would have been understood as only that: just another pneumonia or cancer. Nothing impressive to report. This was an era in which the death of young people from pneumonia was actually quite common. And they would not typically have bothered to test for the pathogen - they would not usually have known if it was Pneumocystis, for example. And only a handful of cases could have occurred in the 1930s, since it would have been very, very early in the epidemic.

The cases in the 1980s still took a few years to kill (from actual time of acquisition of the virus to death - not from time of onset of symptoms to death).

Here is a graph of a logarithmic epidemic.

First, almost no cases for a while. Then, they start to increase. Not only the total number of cases increases, but the rate at which infection occurs also increases. It seems as if you have absolutely nothing for a long time. Then suddenly, all hell breaks loose rapidly.

 

[Centurion]

But then why did it kill those in the 80s and 90s so much faster? Some people would develop it 5 years after exposure. Don't you think strange illnesses would have been reported if it had appeared in the 1930s?

Sorry, I don't think I explained this very well. I didn't mean that people in the 1940s or 1950s would have harbored the virus for decades before it killed them. It would have been the same as the 1980s - a few years from time of acquisition of the virus to death.

But consider that because it is a few years, that makes the epidemic roll out in the general population over an even longer period of time. Consider if one person who has had the virus for five years passes it on to one other person in his fifth year of infection. Case #1 may die over the next couple years but Case #2 may not manifest symptoms (and therefore not get diagnosed) for another five years. That's just two cases in a community in about five to ten years!

Appreciating that the epidemic could not possibly have been realized until there were a fair number of cases in the population, and appreciating the long time from infection to death, and appreciating the logarithmic nature of the curve, you can understand how it might be easy to extrapolate the founder case back a few decades.

I'm not trying to claim I know more than the authors of the paper who claimed the Haitian immigrant arrived about 1969. The authors did exactly what I just described above. They took the numbers of cases known in the 1980s and later and extrapolated that back on the curve. The point at which the number of cases was "one" on their graph was about 1969. But this is an imprecise method. At the low end of the curve, when the number of cases is quite small, a difference of just 10 cases for the entire nation between what you estimate and what may have been actual can throw off your calculation of the time of arrival of the founder case by twenty years!

But realizing that the virus had reached St. Louis by probably the mid 1960s, it seems more reasonable to postulate arrival of the founder case in the 1940s than 1969, to my way of thinking.

(I hope I'm not confusing everyone here!)

 

[tommyj]

That St. Louis teenager (I believe he was 14?) died in 1969. I remember reading about the expose of that 20 years ago this month. It was bizarre. But from what I read recently that he was very promiscious and probably gay. One wonders how he came into contact with someone that carried it in interior US without other people becoming infected by the host (assuming he was fucking others too).

 

[zingerz]

Is this propaganda to fund money towards AIDS research? maybe. is this just another way we've found to ostracize foreigners? maybe. either way w/e the motives it has our attention. Honestly, i don't care enough where it's from it(AIDS/HIV) is in our nation and we should try to prevent it from spreading.