Oldest 'nearly complete' HIV genome found in forgotten tissue sample from 1966
livescience.comPeople 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 mutations per generation.
For HIV, there are plenty of estimates for the mutation rate based off a mixture of statistical bioinformatics and knowledge of genetics. But they are all inferences because we don't have many sequences from before 1988. This relatively ancient genome allows scientists to see how good their estimates are by looking at a genome that will have -20 years worth of mutations. Turns out the estimates are really good. I would then draw the link back to Covid where the mutation rate is estimated in the same way. So it's a good bet that the date estimated for Covid's emergence is pretty close to the mark.
You can see the paper here[0]. I think the actual paper would make a better link on HN, but I guess the press release is useful for those without a molecular biology background.
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 period around the turn of the 20th century (1881 to 1918)."
At that time humanity didn't even know what the virus really is -- they just knew that something in some liquid transmits some illness. The most advanced lab at that time could only get that liquid using the filters.
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.
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" (1)
"Survey data from the United States (US) and South Africa (the only countries for which quantitative data exists) suggest that a significant minority of people endorse such beliefs and that this matters for public health." (2)
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).
(Additionally, the biggest stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons were always in the U.S., apparently more of 10% of the chemical weapons are still not destructed.)
1) http://ncoic.com/aidswar.htm
2) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-9566...
> 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?
Elon Musk
I love the (probably unintended, but still funny) insinuation in 'to much fans' that those fans are an amorphous mass and not countable individuals...
Something being impossible unfortunately in no way makes it less likely to be part of a conspiracy theory. I have the feeling that it's actually the opposite.
It's pointless to try to prove anything to conspiracionists, they'll just tweak their stories and continue as if nothing happened. Anything that goes against their narrative is ignored and quickly forgotten, anything that appears to remotely vaguely confirm their beliefs is amplified and repeated ad nauseam.
Don't waste your time with them. You cannot reason people out of something they were not reasoned into.
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 point.
That's definitely more important, but more easily verifiable right facts help.
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.
> It is pretty obvious 1970ties technology was not advanced enough to pull this stunt. But times change.
Take a step back:
We've been collecting useful yeasts for brewing and cheese production for a very long time, reusing those who yielded better results.
Same as with plants and animals.
So while I don't believe it is man made or synthetic or anything it is smart to have multiple lines of defense against conspiracy theories.
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/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan...
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.
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 think there is any evidence of this, despite the usual suspects (neocon types on our side, and militarists on the Chinese side) ginning up the case for an "escape from lab" casus belli, but let's get the facts straight.
> 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 throughout the entire genome takes decades of evolution. In the wild, that means thousands of generations of hosts.
A virus created in a gain-of-function experiment would also use a well-known backbone. It would not be based on some virus that nobody had ever heard of.
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.
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.
does gain of function require directly engineering the sequence? i saw one gain of function expeeiment where a cat virus was exposed to mouse material, and underwent zoonosis on its own additionally the sequence can just be manually copied over that paper for some reason ignores plausible alternative approaches to creating viruses in the lab
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.
I can't make heads or tails of what you're saying. Fauci was conducting experiments in Wuhan? Where are you getting this from?
here is the article about fauci endorsing and funding such research
https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan...
Good. This is very important reasearch, as the pandemic has shown.
So I'm still not following. You say it is infeasible for a lab to generate sars2, yet it seems Fauci thinks it is feasible enough to fund an attempt.
If I understand your argument, you claim sars2 is too genetically different from the closest public sequences to have been lab engineered. But, what precludes a lab from discovering a virus in the wild that is close to making the jump, and then pushing it the rest of the way? I am not understanding the argument that we have to limit the range of possibility to only the publicly disclosed virus sequences.
For example, if you line up the ace2 site between sars2 and sars, they have a lot of similarity. This author claims the section is essentially copied over, although I don't know if it is statistically significant enough to not just be an accident. https://nerdhaspower.weebly.com/blog/scientific-evidence-and...
So, a "lab origin" theorist could say they isolated a virus in the wild, and copied over the ace2 section from sars, and then ran it through human tissue until it gain enough function to spread effectively in the human population. Is that less or more likely than a coronavirus in the wild mutating enough to make such a lethal jump to humans? Is there any way to put a probability on the two theories?
> You say it is infeasible for a lab to generate sars2, yet it seems Fauci thinks it is feasible enough to fund an attempt.
Saying they were trying to generate SARS-CoV-2 in a lab is a very polemical way of saying that they were studying viral transmission in cell culture. They didn't create SARS-CoV-2. They created viruses that are extremely different from SARS-CoV-2.
> But, what precludes a lab from discovering a virus in the wild that is close to making the jump, and then pushing it the rest of the way?
The Wuhan Institute of Virology publishes identifying genetic sequences of the viruses it samples from the wild. SARS-CoV-2 is not among those viruses. The closest virus (RaTG13) that the WIV found before the pandemic was 4% different from SARS-CoV-2. If SARS-CoV-2 were engineered from RaTG13, then the two viruses would be virtually identical throughout most of their genome. The only differences would be those introduced by the researchers. Yet the two viruses have seemingly random differences throughout their genomes - the types of differences you would not get in gain-of-function experiments. A 4% difference corresponds to many years of divergent evolution. The two viruses might have split as far back as the late 1800s.
So it's certain that SARS-CoV-2 is not engineered on the basis of RaTG13. If you want to claim that the WIV secretly found a different virus, then for unknown reasons didn't publish about that virus, and then started doing gain-of-function experiments on it without telling anyone (including their American scientific collaborators), you're just so far out in the realm of evidence-free conspiracy land that it's not worth responding to.
> copied over the ace2 section from sars
The receptor binding domains of SARS-CoV and SARS-COV-2 are very different from one another. The blog you're looking to is nonsense.
Listen to actual experts, like the virologists at This Week in Virology, not bloggers making wild claims.
thanks, i see what you are saying
regarding the binding sites, clearly they are quite different. but, the similarities seem greater than possible by chance, and i am not sure how that could happen. maybe a variant of sars mutated into sars2?
the sites are at least similar enough that researchers are trying to use sars vaccines to engineer sars2 vaccine
What do you mean that they're more similar than is possible by chance?
Instead of reading conspiracy blogs, go read scientific papers. If you don't understand them, then there is really good introductory course material on virology available from several universities.
Looking at the ACE2 alignment from the article, it looks like there are 55 spots where the sequences have different proteins. Of those 55 spots, 7 of them are identical between the bat and sars2. On the other hand, I count 20 matches between sars and sars2.
Using a uniform distribution over the 20 proteins, and saying the probability of two proteins matching is 1/20, then the binomial probability of getting 7 or more matches out of 55 is 0.02, whereas the probability of getting 20 or more matches is less than 0.000001.
I can see 0.02 being achieved by chance, but 0.000001 seems pretty unlikely to happen by accident. So, there is some sort of non accidental relationship between sars and sars2. Maybe 1) sars2 is descended from sars, or maybe 2) it is lab engineered.
If the bat coronavirus is likely the more proximate ancestor to sars2 than sars, then #1 seems unlikely, which makes #2 the more plausible hypothesis.
Also, to return to your argument about restricting our 'lab origin' hypothesis to known viruses, it seems that if WIV found a very effective bat coronavirus, and intend to create a bioweapon from it, this is exactly the situation when they would not share the sequence. I do not understand why you think people creating a bioweapon would want to share their materials with the world.
You may also find this other article by the same author interesting, pointing out the evidence strongly points to RaTG13 being faked. https://nerdhaspower.weebly.com/ratg13-is-fake.html
There is also this interesting tweet from Jonathan Jacobs that the sample data for RaTG13 does not match the assembled genome. https://twitter.com/bioinformer/status/1252813532850081792
> So, there is some sort of non accidental relationship between sars and sars2.
Yeah, they're both betacoronaviruses. You've just discovered something called "common descent." Charles Darwin published about it in 1859.
I'm sorry, but this is getting comical. You really have to step back and learn some basics about biology before you go on this dive into conspiracy theories.
Hmm, still not following. Why would the fact both are betacoronaviruses entail ace2 is conserved? Is human binding ace2 a common feature of betacoronaviruses? Are you arguing that sars is the more recent ancestor than ratg13?
I blasted sars2 against sars and against ratg13. 88% coverage for the first and 99% for the second, so ratg13 seems to be a much more recent ancestor.
- sars2 v. sars: https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?CMD=Get&RID=D7WE9PB...
- sars2 v. ratg13: https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?CMD=Get&RID=D7WGNJG...
Why would ace2 be much better preserved between sars2 and sars than between sars2 and ratg13?
Apologies for being dense :) As you notice, I'm pretty new to bioinformatics. Just trying to understand what your argument is.
UPDATE: Sorry, I see a mistake I've been making that is confusing. I should be referring to Bat_CoV_ZC45 and Bat_CoV_ZXC21, not ratg13. ratg13 is the one that also has a close match to ace2, but the author claims is a forgery. The bat coronaviruses also seem to be more evolutionarily close to sars2 than sars, and they don't have the ace2 binding sites.
> Why would the fact both are betacoronaviruses entail ace2 is conserved? Is human binding ace2 a common feature of betacoronaviruses? Are you arguing that sars is the more recent ancestor than ratg13?
I'm saying that it's complete nonsense to say that there's a (1/20)^7 chance of 7 amino acids matching. We're talking about viruses that are descended from a common ancestor, not random, independently distributed coin flips.
> ratg13 seems to be a much more recent ancestor.
RaTG13 is not an ancestor of SARS-CoV-2. The two viruses share a common ancestor.
> Why would ace2 be much better preserved between sars2 and sars than between sars2 and ratg13?
ACE2 is a human protein. Neither SARS-CoV-2 nor SARS-CoV have ACE2. If you're talking about the RBD of the S protein, then note that the RBDs of SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV are only 73% homologous, which is a pretty massive difference.
Stepping back for a second, you're diving down the conspiracy-theory rabbit hole with very little prior knowledge of the subject. That's just going to make you easy prey to a lot of nonsense. Really, instead of reading blogs that claim to have found the secret truth about SARS-CoV-2, listen to what respected virologists have to say about it. Do some basic background reading on virology and coronaviruses. Read some review articles from scientific journals.
I've done a bit of reading from the experts. I read the main debunking article about this lab theory, and personally did not really understand why the authors were so confident their evidence eliminated the lab theory.
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
Their two claims are:
1) ace2 binding is much better than humans can engineer with computer simulations
2) virus does not come from any known backbones
Regarding #1, I've found another article where the author was able to induce zoonosis from a feline coronavirus to a mouse by exposing the virus to mouse genetic material. So, the fact humans cannot directly engineer zoonosis very well does not preclude lab induced zoonosis.
- https://www.nature.com/articles/news030331-4
In fact, this is a theory posited at the end of another debunking article, which doesn't actually debunk that particular theory.
- https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-wuhan-lab-complicate...
Regarding #2, as I mentioned before, it seems this line of reasoning is a non sequitur. A virus backbone used to create a bioweapon is exactly the sort of sequence you are not going to upload to NCBI.
The fact the reasoning does not seem very solid in what is considered the official and definitive debunking of the conspiracy theory is itself odd.
So, it is my reading of some respected virologists that in part motivates me down this rabbit hole.
Anyways, I greatly appreciate your feedback. I'll keep learning more about virology, and hopefully get some clarity on the whole matter.
The WIV is not a bioweapons laboratory. It's an academic research institution. Any gain-of-function experiments they would do would be aimed at understanding viruses, not creating weapons. They would use known backbones, not a virus nobody has ever heard of, that they've never even uploaded to a database.
I'm going to suggest to you that the reason you don't find the reasoning in the debunking to be solid is that you don't understand the field very well. I don't know what your specialty is, but imagine someone who has no experience in it. They might have a lot of weird conceptions about your specialty, they might have no idea how things work in your field, they might find a lot of things surprising. Things that you find obvious might seem dubious to a novice. The arguments made in the debunking are considered very strong by experts in the field. That's what matters.
Yes, that is a fair point. I just wish the experts were better communicators to us lay people.
> 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?
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 mixed symptoms also make it somewhat uncertain.
[0] as may have been the case for Robert Rayford who looks to have been something of a terminal case rather than vector or victim of a more widespread infection
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.
TLDR: The "news" is not the age of the samples, there are older ones, but that the virus genome is still intact and allows for a more accurate estimation of mutation rates and origins of HIV.
"There are older fragments of HIV out there, one from 1959 and one from 1960, also from DRC. But those pieces aren't as complete, and thus can't offer as much information about the virus' mutations. "
If you have time I would recommend two movies that touches deeply upon this topic. They are 'Philadelphia'[1] which garnered a 'Best Actor' Oscar for Tom Hanks and 'And the band played on'[2] starring Mathew Modine.
'Philadelphia' a fictional movie that touches on the social stigma associated with HIV and 'And the band played on' captures the politics of why it was ignored by Reagan and his supporters for so long and the sad politics and scientific infighting in the chase for a cure.
Both are incredible movies.
Both are really incredible movies, and I'd also highly recommend them. "How To Survive A Plague" is pretty great too (it even features everyone's favorite NIH official, Anthony Fauci!).
One thing worth being aware of with "And The Band Played On": it's quite old, and science advanced a lot after the book it's based on was written, so it's sometimes factually inaccurate (Gaetan Dugas didn't personally cause the pandemic, and the incubation period is longer than they thought then). It's not a work of history or a documentary, but it makes for fascinating viewing precisely because it was made so close to the events that the story it tells is not neat and polished with the benefit of decades of hindsight and narrative shaping. It's chaotic and emotional and raw and authentic and, inevitably, sometimes wrong about stuff that wasn't known then.
The Gaetan Dugas thing seems to dominate every discussion about And The Band Plays on which is too bad because the book is like 600 pages long, tracks dozens of real life individuals, has tons of incredible primary source material, and gives a very touching, grounded, contemporary look at AIDS in the early 80s.
And out of the small portion of the book that talks about Dugas, I never got the impression that Schilts was trying the blame him for causing the pandemic, but rather that he was using him as a real life example of the type of man that existed in that era, who flew around the country having sex with thousands (yes thousands) of other men, whose behavior doubtlessly and unknowingly sped the spread of AIDS.
Most people have only seen the film, I think (I only read half the book). Gaetan Dugas is much more prominently featured in the film, which pretty strongly implies he was a key factor in the wide spread of HIV.
A much more interesting Aids movie is Cold Case Hammerskjöld, which could explain the discrepancy of existence of the virus in these early samples. Highly controversial though.
i really liked dallas buyers club[0], which was heartbreaking and uplifting at the same time.
Yes! The comments on this thread made me think of Philadelphia instantly!
I have Bruce Springsteen’s Streets of Philadelphia (the titular song of that film) playing right in this instant.
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 accept the bodies of gay men. When people knew they were at the end of the rope, they would ask their friends to throw their ashes over the fence into the white house lawn. That way as their final act, they could tell the government that their active silence was literally killing people and that even if they considered them others, they wouldn't be ignored.
It's heartbreaking, but I'd recommend anyone to listen to the interview if you don't know much about that period in history.
[1] https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/shame-on-you/e/66787240
In 2002, I was back in my hometown after some years away. By then they estimated that HIV infection was running at 1/3 of the population. I had a job that took me most days to the local cemetery, and was harrowed by the next round of graves freshly dug, most three foot long. I imagine you can guess why they were so short. And if that sounds angry, it is anger - still - but not directed at you, OP. I went to the hospital on one occasion to see the child of a friend, a little boy called AK, draw his last breath. His name was a reference to the machine gun; a child of a revolution I didn’t understand.
I’m not sure why I write this. I never really spoke of it before. I think I found your comment deeply moving.
Your story is heartbreaking. Thank you for sharing. I would love to learn more about your hometown and hope it has fared better since 2002.
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.
> 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.
Effective HIV suppression is not cheap, and usually out of reach of developing countries or poor communities such as… pretty much all of sub-saharan africa, where the AIDS pandemic remains essentially unchecked.
According to wikipedia, as of 2016, 8 countries had more than 10% of the population infected and two of them (Swaziland / Eswatini and Lesotho) were above 25%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_Africa#/media/File...
Given mother-to-child transmission is somewhere between 15 and 45% without mitigation measures (which are unlikely to be in place in a country where a quarter of the population is infected), we're talking 5~10% of children born infected.
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...
The Australian government's 1987 "Grim Reaper" ad gives some impression of the mood at the time. Of course, it didn't do any favours to the gay community.
Italy’s 1990 “AIDS: If you know it, you avoid it” public service advertisement is indelibly seared into the consciousness of my whole generation. Drawing purple outlines around things is still an instant reminder of that. The soundtrack is often heard overlaid over threatening scenarios much as the Benny Hill soundtrack is overload over situations to indicate they are ‘funny’.
What a sad way to ruin the song "Oh Superman" by Laurie Anderson.
It's one of my all-time favourite songs, since I was a kid. Italian partner looked at me oddly first time I played it at home, as her memory of it was all bundled up in grim negativity.
It's not a song that gets played much at home, when she's about :(
Yeah, it’s really ingrained in us. It’s shorthand for existential dread.
Damn son. That gave me chills.
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 my Mother describing double gloves, smocks, and face shields when dealing with the blood. Despite the times, I think the folks who work in the funeral industry at that time (mostly family run) were truly compassionate about caring for someone’s remains regardless of who they were and didn’t judge. While they had concerns about dealing with this first case, it became routine (sadly) very quickly thereafter. I’d imagine they received referrals from their handling of that first case. And very quickly they started handling all remains are handled as if they were HIV positive.
The only other thing I do recall was some concern on this first case about folks showing up to disrupt the Funeral in part because most of the mourners were from the gay community. So I think they hired the an officer from the local PD to provide security but nothing happened.
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.
And The Band Played On, the whole 1993 film (2h20min) is on YouTube. It's based on a 1987 book.
The Randy Shilts book it is based upon is a very engaging and detailed record of the AIDS epidemic in the US. He himself sadly died of it, shortly after finishing the book.
The white house lawn comment sounds powerful. But I don't see any evidence it actually happened. Right?
Looking closer I found this [1] which is the guy the interviewee was speaking about. It looks like it was his ashes, not literally his corpse. I think it was referred to as his body in the podcast which is where I got it from, but I'm assuming that was in the sense of "what remains of his body". I'll update my post.
It looks like the white house lawn is home to the remains of at least 18 gay men that died from AIDS.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vdqv34/why-the-ashes-of-a...
I followed the AIDS crisis in the newspaper from Day One, starting with one-inch long columns about "mysterious purple lesions called Kaposi's sarcoma" to shrines with hundreds of photos occupying whole sections.
The similarity with corona in 2020 is that so little was known, but for years, not months. The difference was that AIDS was 100% fatal until drugs were developed, and AIDS killed a generation of young adults rather than older people.
(There were interviews with a handful of men who were immune to the AIDS virus, but had to endure all of their friends and partners dying, and had to deal with inheriting a lot of possessions that reminded them of dead people.)
Almost all hemophiliacs in North America used pooled blood products from thousands of donors, so just about all of them died. (There's a Canadian film on Youtube that covers this.)
Isaac Asimov was so embarrassed to have contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion that it wasn't mentioned 'til after his death.
I had no idea that he died of AIDS and that was in the 90s. It's terrifying how recent it was that he would have received public backlash for contracting a disease during a surgery.
I feel like you're leaving homophobia out of the equation. Asimov was ashamed, and there would have been a backlash, because society associated AIDS with gay men. If people had really believed that he'd got it through surgery, there wouldn't have been a bad reaction.
To be fair, 1990 is 30 years ago.
I remember how much of a hero Magic Johnson was presented as being for simply publicly admitting he got it during surgery and advocating.
It was brave for a multi-millionaire celebrity to admit publicly that he got it by accident. If he'd have been gay too my gosh... what scandal...
Terrifying indeed.
At the time, some pediatricians used to give moms after birth a pint of blood to "pinken them up" (make their cheeks rosy.)
Of course, that gratuitous pint gave some of them AIDS or liver disease for no useful purpose.
More and more you realize hospitals are the most dangerous place to be, emphasized by corona, but the CDC maintains a list of about 18 infectious diseases rampant in hospitals today.
Yeah- I remember being in high school biology class and we had a poster of AIDS symptoms from HIV infection (KS, along with others). Would have been mid-to-late 1980s. Fast forward to grad school- 1995-2001 and I'm working with protein structures like HIV protease and reverse transcriptase to find drugs that interfere with them. Only around 2001 did drugs start to be approved that were really effective.
I still remember that poster with KS and other symptoms on it, some 35 years later. Folks outside of biology have no idea how slow the time frames of some disease treatments can be.
>There's a Canadian film on Youtube that covers this.
Yeah it was a major scandal here in Canada. The Red Cross lost the right to handle blood a new organization called Canadian Blood Services was created.
Many people with hemophilia died but I think people at the tail end of it were around when the new drug cocktails slowed the disease.
As a teen in the 80s AIDS was pretty scary even for a straight kid with no girlfriend. It seemed like everyone was talking about it, getting it, scared of people with it, or denying it existed.
Anthony Fauci had a hard time getting Pres. Reagan to even take it seriously (sound familiar!?). Many conservatives saw it as the "gay disease" and dismissed it as irrelevant.
Look up The Ashes Action organized by ActUP
You know how public restrooms in the USA always have paper toilet seat covers? This dates to that era (the product existed already but was extremely uncommon).
Because of that whenever I see those I think of the bigoted attitude that lead to their deployment and won't use them.
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!
Well, I survived for decades before they were widespread, and have survived since, so...
There are more pathogens on your hands than on your butt, as you touch the whole world with your hands and keep your butt most of the time in your pants.
Really? I'd think they'd be more likely for things like herpes, staph and maybe fungal diseases.
They do help for those things, and not for HIV. But which caused them to be deployed?
And the band played on. Great film that tells the story
This reminds me of an art history class in college; amidst a lecture covering works in the '80s and '90s, the professor just broke down in tears as a lot of the artists he knew personally, and had passed from AIDS at the time...
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 unlikely, given what I knew of history.
We had very little idea of what constituted "transmissible" and what did not for a period of time, and so while our parents had "free love" and The Pill, with the biggest risk being herpes, at least a section of my generation got "sex = death" internalized on top of all of the other apocalyptic gloom.
Of course, even what would be transmissible was subject to propaganda: on one side, you had people arguing for any gay sex being a risk, but on the other side, some activists insisted that heterosexual intercourse was exactly and precisely as risky as homosexual (male) intercourse. Quite a lot of misinformation floating around.
Grew up at the tale end of that, during reagan 80's. Learned how to hide under a desk for nukes. Hide under a doorframe for quakes. But Ghostbusters was good.
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.
You understand heterosexual people have anal sex too, right? It's become quite trendy.
Everyone here knows precisely what was being discussed. Me, the writer, you. Why quibble?
I suppose I should have written "vaginal sex". ...but the majority of hetero sex is still penis-in-vagina so I think my comment is still mostly correct.
The fact that it was downvoted sort of underscores my point, that people prefer reinforcing their feelings, rather than know the truth.
s/hetero/vanilla and the point stands
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?
You may wish to try https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS#Transmission
Receptive penile-vaginal intercourse* at 0.05–0.30% Receptive anal intercourse* at 0.04–3.0%
Given the error bars ...
"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.
This makes my blood boil.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23357730.
This is an amazing piece of history.
Human nature at its most unfiltered.
The press in those clips seem to be pathetically lapping up Speakes' cuntery, though, and somehow manage to come across even worse than him.
Is it that much different than how everyone jokes about HSV1 today? It is still a (ridiculous and stupid) running punchline on SNL. Obviously it is a far less dire virus (as far as we know, today) but, we as a species (generally) compared to our individual potential, are absolute idiots and almost always take the easy intellectual route (humor and bullshit) when faced with uncommon information.
The video really seems like par for the course and not surprising in the slightest...
> Is it that much different than how everyone jokes about HSV1 today?
Yes, the governments refusal to act on the AIDS crisis and the substantial stigma around the disease - resulting in hundreds of thousands of dead is "much different" from jokes about oral herpes on SNL.
“far less dire” is an understatement. HSV-1 causes only cosmetic effects in the vast majority of cases.
Herpes virusses can stay in the body in all kind of parts and can cause all kind of things.
For example they make gum disease a lot worse (which then in turn is linked to Alzheimer's for example) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1034/j.1600-051x....
Note that there is a ton of other HSV-*, for example HSV-6 https://hhv-6foundation.org/what-is-hhv-6 I think there is just not enough research yet on what is caused or made worse by which herpes virus.
Except when it doesn't. HSV encephalitis is not trivial. Post HSV neuralgia is no fun.
That is... not exactly true: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/06/21/6219083...
I was not trying to diminish the atrocity that is how the AIDS epidemic was handled, I was only trying to illuminate that people (and the super-majority of our lawmakers) are immature and uninformed when talking about all infectious diseases.
Edit: just look at our President’s response to Covid... it is bumbling and moronic.
So what, this tentative research that shows no causal link whatsoever between HSV-1 and alzheimers is the same as the 32 million killed by AIDS globally?
No. It isn't. Stop trivializing HIV. I don't know what you're getting out of it, but it comes across as incredibly tone deaf.
I truly was not trying to offend or trivialize anything: my only point, as best as I can distill it, is that people react irrationally and inappropriately to infectious diseases. And we need to work on that. This is not at all unique to HIV/AIDS, even though people suffering from AIDS have born the brunt of the actual suffering. If we can’t have open, rational discussions about HSV, how can we do the same with HIV?
Edit: grammar
I understand the point you were trying to get across. Many STIs have substantial stigma around them and it makes it harder to fight them.
I just want to caution you that making these forms of equivalences is a common tactic to derail and discount the impact of HIV or the experience of populations disproportionately harmed, in the same way that people derail discussions about the disproportionate killing of black people by police with statements like "why focus on black people? nobody should be killed by police."
I believe that you were not intending to do so, but I also hope that you understand and can be cognizant of that dynamic.
MiroF - I (could not initially) reply to your comment directly, but that was a perfect analogy to make your point. I can definitely see how my first comment could be taken that way, and that was not at all my intention. As with many things, I gotta work on my contextual phrasing and presentation!
I never understood the stigma part. Random sex exposes you to STI. IV drug use also exposes you to HIV and Hep B. It's fine to blame lung cancer on smoking (even though you can get lung cancer without it). It's however considered not fine to judge people for other risky choices. Go figure.
Semi-related: Thinking about this era I wondered how long it look for AIDS to kill 100,000 Americans. The answer is about 5 years. CoViD did it in 5 months.
Yet we still have biology teachers the school I work at asking why we shut down for Corona/Covid and not HIV/Aids. He's a fucking biology teacher, and he refuses to see the difference because he wants his precious soccer team to play this year. It's so damn frustrating, especially knowing that nothing will happen to him because he's a coach.
Now do the comparison with the 1950/51 Asian flu pandemic, and ask the same question.
It's an area under the graph thing.
I'm not sure that's a useful comparison. Without treatment, HIV takes an average of 8–10 years to kill a person, but it has a >90% fatality rate.
You are comparing a sprinter to a marathon runner. It's hard to do the comparison justice using just one statistic.
It's disturbing that we are being told to learn to live with the virus when there is such a high risk of contraction.
High risk but most infected have close to no symptoms which is nothing like AIDS which used to be a death sentence.
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.
> most infected have close to no symptoms
Only most of recently infected have no symptoms, whereas most of infected do develop symptoms, but typically after they already transmitted the illness to other people. According to what it is currently known, from all infected around 80% do eventually develop some symptoms, up to 10% need hospital, up to 5% need intensive care and around 1% of all infected eventually die. That is when observed across all age groups, among the older it's much worse.
And as soon as the health system can't cope the percentages of dead increase rapidly to even higher values -- i.e. those that need hospital need it because half of them will need intensive care (and nobody knows before it's critical who), those that need intensive care need it because most of them will need oxygen in some form and half of these will need:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracheal_intubation
That's why it's undesired to have non-functioning health system, and to avoid overwhelming the existing health systems.
That's not accurate. "mild cases" is not the same as "no symptoms".
Read again: "close to no symptoms"
Insofar as you are being told this, the reason you are being told is the high risk of contraction.
As opposed to what exactly?
Which doesn't really mean that HIV/AIDS is not dangerous, but rather it underscores how much more dangerous CoViD really is.
I truly hope we manage a better response than the AIDS crisis, because a similar response to COVID-19 would be incredibly devastating.
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.
Maybe?
I’m not sure that prophylactics really would be the deciding factor. Condoms are older than you might think, but on the other hand usage rates are still relatively low.
And humanity keeps bouncing back from things: for example, the plague (multiple times!)
I think the relatively long incubation time is probably what would have made it especially bad if it had taken hold earlier - say, in the 1800s when our understanding would have been limited and our ability to track it worse. It might have been much, much worse then.
Not really because penis / vaginal sex still had a low risk of transmission.
That's why it erupted in the gay community first.
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.
AIDS killed healthy young men. The same is not true of COVID.
I wouldn’t compare those two viruses directly. HIV is sexually transmitted, whereas COVID is spread through exhaled water droplets.
Think about how often the average person has sex vs how often they’re around tons of strangers who are exhaling, coughing, etc.
Not to mention it takes quite some time for someone to die from an opportunistic infection as a result of being immunocompromised from AIDS.
Or put it like this.
In NY alone there have been 23K deaths due to covid 19.
911 had about 3K dead.
This was over 7 911 events in a matter of 3 months.
Nationally it's about 33 911s in 3 months.
It's like five jetliner crashes every day for the last three months.
Air-travel is so safe, yet humans insist on being completely paranoid about it.
I read an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that was bitching that the government was spending way too much money on AID's research instead of important things like heart disease.
I read that, looked at their statistics and backed out an estimate of number of years of life lost for AID and Heart disease. And yeah AID's was a really big deal unless you were a sociopathic old white male editor at the WSJ.
Reading what the Wall Street Journal thinks about SARS-COV2 shows they haven't changed a bit in 35 years.
A 90's film telling the story of how AIDS was ignored.