# HIV being a man made virus?



## Creator (Feb 26, 2008)

I was led to think that HIV was a man made virus by a few factors

*The Year it was discovered and started*
This is one of the areas for suspicion. Bascially as far as records go, HIV was kinda reared its ugly head in the 1950s. That was at least a few short years after the WW2. And also there were records of Nazis invading Africa in the ww2. So it's not surprising that the Nazi being homephobic and racist, would make something to cull the undesirable population apart from tankers and soldiers.

*The birthplace it shares with many viruses of the same nature*
It just too coincident that the mostly horrible or sexually/ intravenously spread diseases came from Africa. You can blame the bushmeat trade but then. The Bushmeat trade has been going on for millions of years so why after 1950s we began to see its effects?

*Our Closest relatives*
Chimpanzees have been the subject of experiments due to our genetic similarities. It would not be surprising that maybe someone experimented on them and it escaped and spreaded it's disease. Many of the worst ecological disasters came from experimented or introduced wildlife.


----------



## Lith (Feb 26, 2008)

Uh, not convinced. I doubt very much the NAZIs had the capability to engineer viruses, or that they would loose such a thing in Africa, which was only very tangentially involved in the war. And it's much too slow a killer.

Furthermore, Africa is home to the greatest _variety_ of life, period. Even among people, the genetic differences between regions are greater than anywhere else on earth. And being that chimps (our closest relatives, I believe?) are only in Africa has a lot to do with it. So I don't find it surprising that Africa would harbor some of the worst diseases out there.


----------



## Creator (Feb 26, 2008)

Creator said:


> It just too coincident that the mostly horrible or sexually/ intravenously spread diseases came from Africa. You can blame the bushmeat trade but then. The Bushmeat trade has been going on for millions of years so why after 1950s we began to see its effects?
> .



OK but I believe that the local people have been doing well and eating apes and chimps for many many years and with no ill effects. How then it just pop out just like that?

And another thing is that the Nazi have experimented on humans so it may not be surprising that they might have done the inevitable.

Also I am open to the idea that maybe early eugenics in America may to blame too! Apparently in the Afro and homosexual people, there is an urban legend saying that the HIV was engineered to kill them!


----------



## PTeppic (Feb 26, 2008)

I have seen a TV program making this point, though it was more technical about it. It included arguments such as the complexity of the virus and how fast it adapts - far faster than anything else in nature.


----------



## Wybren (Feb 26, 2008)

Ok here is my 2 cents.

I read a book in highschool, I was either "Virus Hunters of the CDC" or  " The coming plague" as I read them both. It talks about the early experimentation with finding a vaccine for polio. There was a guy who was competing with Sabin and Salk and the processes used to make the cultures involves using primate livers. Certain primates carry a virus known as SIV and it is possible that as we have a similar make up to our primate cousins that those people involve in the trial, in the Belgian Congo, may have been infected with a simian precursor to HIV . The timing of the trials and the location do correspond with where "Ground Zero" would be if you take into account the time it would take to evolve into what we know as HIV. Many people reject this hypothesis, but from the lot of reading I have done on this I am tending to agree with it. What troubles me is how many other diseases may have come about this way, by people not taking care to ensure that they aren't using contaminated specimens while trying to create vaccines.


----------



## mosaix (Feb 26, 2008)

Some time back I read that researches had come close to finding the first recorded case. Searching back through medical records they found an English sailor who died in, I think, Salford England in the 50's who had symptoms very similar to HIV. Of course, the symptoms weren't recognised at the time for what they were.


----------



## Delvo (Feb 26, 2008)

Creator said:


> OK but I believe that the local people have been doing well and eating apes and chimps for many many years and with no ill effects. How then it just pop out just like that?


It didn't. Diseases have been there in Africa all along, sometimes increasing in outbreaks and sometimes lulling out of sight between outbreaks. And many of them don't need the host to be human, so they can be completely gone from humans for a while but still around in animals, so they reappear in humans the next time someone gets bitten by an infected monkey. This pattern has been known in multiple different diseases for several centuries. Even in early colonial times, white travelers thought of the various wild, hot parts of the world as places where diseases waited to get them. Today, traveling to many tropical countries still calls for a list of immunizations. There isn't anything even slightly unusual about this at all in any way.



Creator said:


> And another thing is that the Nazi have experimented on humans...


...using technology which was actually available to them... which does NOT include the level of genetic manipulation it would take to create a new virus. We can't even do that NOW. You might as well be contemplating whether or not the Cherokee were the first people to invent fighter jets with laser-guided missiles. Regardless of motivation because it's irrelevant, the technological ability is just not there.

And if it's supposed to kill black people and homosexual people, then why doesn't it? It infects ANY people, and doesn't even seem to do anything to some of them, at random.


----------



## Nik (Feb 26, 2008)

IMHO, HIV isn't man-made, it just found an ideal host environment and ran wild...

Happens I lost a bet when the genetic engineers traced HIV's route out of Africa. I'd reckoned it was due those discreet Swiss etc clinics and their 'rejuvenating' monkey-gland injections. I was wrong. Seems one (1) case-zero in California set off US epidemic...

IIRC, HIV's biochemistry has some some similarities to 'Black Death', and the several waves of that across Europe during Middle Ages has selected for enhanced resistance in some populations.

Um, big worry is if Bird Flu acquires human/human infectivity mutation, causing majority of immunity-impaired population to fall over...


----------



## K. Riehl (Feb 29, 2008)

I was under the impression that encroachment on habitat led to the initial outbreak. Humans venturing further and further into remote areas in the search for food/fuel/animal trade.

The story of the last Ebola outbreak(2001) was pretty awful. 4 boys from a local village come  into a clearing with 3 dead monkeys laying in the grass. As they were poor and starving; they cooked and ate the dead monkeys. The monkeys had died from the Ebola and it transfered to  the kids who, in turn, infected the other villagers. 

Couldn't the first HIV cases come about the same way? All it takes is blood transfer.


----------



## Somni (Feb 29, 2008)

> I was under the impression that encroachment on habitat led to the initial outbreak. Humans venturing further and further into remote areas in the search for food/fuel/animal trade.


  I have heard similar, but cannot remember the reference.


----------



## Wybren (Feb 29, 2008)

It has to do with the nature of the virus. HIV is quite fragile outside the living host, and needs to be directly transfused into the blood stream. Ebola is an entirely different thing all together and is not transmitted in the same way and can cross species, while many animals have illnesses similar to HIV, HIV is specific to Humans. I don't believe HIV was purposely engineered but I do think that it was the result of humans using unsafe practices in the manufacture of vaccines.


----------



## K. Riehl (Mar 1, 2008)

From Wybren-"HIV is quite fragile outside the living host, and needs to be directly transfused into the blood stream."

Wouldn't eating the still warm liver be enough to transfer the virus?
Many hunters regard the liver of the just killed animal as a delicacy. This practice is followed by tribes all over the world. It relates to malnourishment and the body craving the trace minerals that liver provides. 

Also dressing the kill involves a large amount of blood and if you have an open cut...

Here is an excerpt from a Columbia University report and Sky News.2/20/2008


"The report said that if a monitoring system is not put in place "then human populations will continue to be at risk from pandemic diseases".
HIV/Aids, which has killed or infected as many as 65 million people worldwide, is believed to have jumped from chimpanzees to humans, possibly through hunters who killed and butchered apes."

I still think this is the most likely scenario.


----------



## Vladd67 (Mar 1, 2008)

In the book _The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB_, written by Christopher M. Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, *Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin* (Russian: Василий Никитич Митрохин) (March 3, 1922–January 23, 2004) who was a Major and senior archivist for the Soviet Union's foreign intelligence service, the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, stated that the story that HIV and AIDS were man made in an American laboratory was pure black propaganda issued by the KGB


----------



## Wybren (Mar 2, 2008)

K. Riehl said:


> From Wybren-"HIV is quite fragile outside the living host, and needs to be directly transfused into the blood stream."
> 
> Wouldn't eating the still warm liver be enough to transfer the virus?
> Many hunters regard the liver of the just killed animal as a delicacy. This practice is followed by tribes all over the world. It relates to malnourishment and the body craving the trace minerals that liver provides.
> ...



If you ate the still warm liver from a _human_ with HIV and you had a cut in your mouth then perhaps it could be possible. Since HIV does not exist in primates other than humans then it would be very unlikely.

Also the Ape butchering cross over theory fails in that humans have been butchering Apes for a long long time, and HIV has only appeared relatively recently. If it had been transmitted from Apes via this way it would have emerged a long time ago.

"The Coming Plague" is a good book to read if anyone is interested in reading a bit more about HIV and other "plagues"

"Level 4: Virus Hunters of the CDC" is great if you want to learn more about the hard core viruses like Ebola and Lassa Fever. This was written by two front line Epidemiologists. 

These are really worth the read for those wanting to know more, especially from those who really want to know more. not for the queesy though.


----------



## sushil (Mar 3, 2008)

Many people do not develop any symptoms when they first become infected with HIV. Some people, however, get a flu-like illness within three to six weeks after exposure to the virus. This illness, called Acute HIV Syndrome, may include fever, headache, tiredness, nausea, diarrhoea and enlarged lymph nodes (organs of the immune system that can be felt in the neck, armpits and groin). These symptoms usually disappear within a week to a month and are often mistaken for another viral infection. 
 During this period, the quantity of the virus in the body will be high and it spreads to different parts, particularly the lymphoid tissue. At this stage, the infected person is more likely to pass on the infection to others. The viral quantity then drops as the body's immune system launches an orchestrated fight.


----------



## Rosemary (Mar 7, 2008)

Whether it is man made or not, what I would like to know is why isn't it spread by mosquitoes?  Here in Australia the mosquitoes can infect humans with the Ross River Virus, why not HIV?


----------



## Wybren (Mar 8, 2008)

I read some where that it cant survive in mosquitoes


----------



## Delvo (Mar 8, 2008)

Conditions in a mosquito body are different from conditions in a human body, from temperature to pH to concentrations of all kinds of chemicals to immune system to different host cell membranes to try to get through. That's a bunch of different ways for the environment to be just as inhospitable as an oven or a bare cold rock or the bottom of a jar full of cyanic acid. There are plenty of parasites and pathogens that can't switch from species to species for that kind of reason; in order to do so, it would need to just happen to be able to handle BOTH kinds of conditions. And that's rare. Otherwise, everything in the world could get everything else's diseases. Lizards could get rabies, dogs could get hoof-&-mouth disease, you and I could get Dutch elm disease or chestnut blight...


----------



## sushil (Mar 10, 2008)

Hmmmmmmmmm thats great!!!!

And thanks for explain *HIV*.


----------



## Rosemary (Mar 10, 2008)

Thank you Delvo!  That was something I have been wondering about for a long time.  NIce to know that it can't happen and that I won't get  Dutch Elm disease.


----------



## Creator (Mar 29, 2008)

But then I heard that if a person has a mouth ulcer even chimp meat can pass him the virus.


----------



## TorrnT (Mar 29, 2008)

I concur with Delvo he saved me a lecture, just check his posts on the matter if you need convincing.


----------



## Creator (Mar 29, 2008)

Well I am convinced with the fact that mozzies can't spread HIV. But the fact remains that I read about sooty magebies being eaten by Chimps and then chimps being eaten by humans. This was the most discussed route of transmission of HIV. Any comments?


----------

