Apparently it's been around since 1969, and was found in the United States back then. Here's the link: http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=aaaeb892-1643-4496-b116-1f1364e8bef3&k=97181
Here's the article in case the link above doesn't work:
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<u><b>B.C.-born doctor isolated HIV in 1969</b></u>
More than a decade before North American men started dying en masse of a mysterious virus then referred to as the "gay cancer", a Vancouver-born scientist had unknowingly isolated the AIDS virus in a deathly ill teenager in St. Louis, Missouri.
Dr. Memory Elvin-Lewis, a University of B.C. graduate, was a young researcher specializing in chlamydia at Washington University in 1968 when she was introduced to patient "Robert R," a 15-year-old African-American youth who came to hospital suffering from an assortment of illnesses. The teen was extremely tired and rapidly losing weight. His lymph nodes, legs and scrotum were badly swollen, and, within months, he began to develop a type of skin cancer -- now known as Kaposi's sarcoma -- which appeared as lesions all over his body.
Elvin-Lewis also positively tested the youth with a severe chlamydia infection. He died in 1969 after contracting bronchial pneumonia.
At the time, the youth's medical team were completely baffled by his symptoms which stubbornly proved resistant to treatment, Elvin-Lewis said in a telephone interview Friday from her Missouri home.
"All of us who worked on this young man knew that there was something really, very wrong," she said.
The young scientist knew enough, however, to carefully take and store tissue samples from the patient in her university freezer.
In 1970, she presented a paper on Robert R.'s symptoms at a chlamydia conference, suggesting the boy had suffered from some sort of underlying viral infection that caused him to have a suppressed immune system. The paper was not well-received.
"It was so against the dogma of the day," she said. "As far as they [more senior researchers in the field] were concerned, I was a heretic."
It took until 1987 for Elvin-Lewis to be vindicated in the scientific community. New research techniques developed in the years after the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS was identified showed Robert R.'s tissue samples to be HIV-positive.
The case blew the lid off previous theories that AIDS had arrived in North America, likely from Africa, in the 1970s. In fact, Elvin-Lewis said, "it may be that cases of AIDS have come and gone in the United States several decades earlier."
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This is what happens when you "fuck" with nature, so to speak.
Here's the article in case the link above doesn't work:
<div STYLE="color: blue ; background:yellow; border-style:solid">
<u><b>B.C.-born doctor isolated HIV in 1969</b></u>
More than a decade before North American men started dying en masse of a mysterious virus then referred to as the "gay cancer", a Vancouver-born scientist had unknowingly isolated the AIDS virus in a deathly ill teenager in St. Louis, Missouri.
Dr. Memory Elvin-Lewis, a University of B.C. graduate, was a young researcher specializing in chlamydia at Washington University in 1968 when she was introduced to patient "Robert R," a 15-year-old African-American youth who came to hospital suffering from an assortment of illnesses. The teen was extremely tired and rapidly losing weight. His lymph nodes, legs and scrotum were badly swollen, and, within months, he began to develop a type of skin cancer -- now known as Kaposi's sarcoma -- which appeared as lesions all over his body.
Elvin-Lewis also positively tested the youth with a severe chlamydia infection. He died in 1969 after contracting bronchial pneumonia.
At the time, the youth's medical team were completely baffled by his symptoms which stubbornly proved resistant to treatment, Elvin-Lewis said in a telephone interview Friday from her Missouri home.
"All of us who worked on this young man knew that there was something really, very wrong," she said.
The young scientist knew enough, however, to carefully take and store tissue samples from the patient in her university freezer.
In 1970, she presented a paper on Robert R.'s symptoms at a chlamydia conference, suggesting the boy had suffered from some sort of underlying viral infection that caused him to have a suppressed immune system. The paper was not well-received.
"It was so against the dogma of the day," she said. "As far as they [more senior researchers in the field] were concerned, I was a heretic."
It took until 1987 for Elvin-Lewis to be vindicated in the scientific community. New research techniques developed in the years after the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS was identified showed Robert R.'s tissue samples to be HIV-positive.
The case blew the lid off previous theories that AIDS had arrived in North America, likely from Africa, in the 1970s. In fact, Elvin-Lewis said, "it may be that cases of AIDS have come and gone in the United States several decades earlier."
</div>
This is what happens when you "fuck" with nature, so to speak.
