What was the cause/origin of HIV?
Studies of the oldest known HIV suggests the virus jumped from animals to humans in the 1940s. The year was 1959, location: The central African city of Leopoldville, now called Kinshasa, shortly before the waves of violent rebellion that followed the liberation of the Belgian Congo. A seemingly healthy man walked into a hospital clinic to give blood for a Western backed study of blood diseases. He walked away and was never heard from again. Doctors analyzed his sample, froze it in a test tube and forgot about it. A quarter-century later, in the mid-1980s, researchers studying the growing AIDS epidemic took a second look at the blood and discovered that it contained HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. And not just any HIV. The Leopoldville sample is the oldest specimen of the AIDS virus ever isolated and may now help solve the mystery of how and when the virus made the leap from animals (monkeys or chimpanzees) to humans, according to a report published last week in Nature. Dr. David Ho, d
