Paleovirology: How HIV Started a Century Before Anyone Noticed
I’ve been vaguely aware for awhile that researchers had traced the origins of HIV/AIDS back to Sub-Saharan Africa. But I didn’t know the whole story, which turns out to be really fascinating.
For decades, one man was blamed for bringing AIDS to America. But the “Patient Zero” story was wrong. This is the story of how genetic detective work traced HIV’s true origins — from chimpanzees in Central Africa to a global pandemic — and how science unraveled one of the biggest myths in modern medicine.
Disappointingly, they didn’t list any of their sources for the video. I poked around a little and found a book called The Origins of AIDS that a Science magazine review called:
Extensively referenced, the well-written book reads like a detective story, while at the same time providing a didactic introduction to epidemiology and evolutionary genetics. As far as the origins of AIDS are concerned, unless some completely new evidence emerges, it will be difficult to come up with a better explanation than Pepin’s.
The YouTube comments are worth a read too, filled with remarks from those who lived through the early years of the pandemic or knew someone who did (or someone who didn’t).
Had a gay uncle who lived in San Francisco in the 80s and 90s. He would get so upset when he talked about HIV/AIDS. He lost so many friends to the virus. When I went to visit him in the 2000s, we visited 27 graves over the course of a weekend and laid flowers. Rest in peace to all those young people.
I worked in blood banking at Cedars -Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. It was policy to freeze blood samples from patients that expired due an unknown cause. Once the HIV test was approved the samples were tested and some were reactive to it. The samples were collected over decades, going back to the 1950s.
I have family who were foreign hospital workers in the now-DRC in the 1970s, where what we call AIDS was known as the Slims because of how the patients wasted away and died. People on the ground knew there was something going around, but they didn’t have the resources to figure it out.
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