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--- afra dias <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >WE DO KNOW how it first came about. > >Just like chickens have an ever present salomila >bacteria in them. Monkey family have AIDS virus in >their body. The Belgians - when they were >experimenting on the Apes, and sending samples of >internal organs to Belgium for disection etc, the >virus got in contact with humans. > There is absolutely no truth to the above assertions. We do not know how it first came about. We do not know exactly how the chimp virus mutated to become infectious in humans, and how exactly the first humans were infected. Here are some relevant quotes from a Centers for Disease Control article which tells us about the first known case, and the current best guess as to how the first HIV carriers might have been infected. "The earliest known case of HIV-1 in a human was from a blood sample collected in 1959 from a man in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo. (How he became infected is not known.) Genetic analysis of this blood sample suggested that HIV-1 may have stemmed from a single virus in the late 1940s or early 1950s." "For many years scientists theorized as to the origins of HIV and how it appeared in the human population, most believing that HIV originated in other primates. Then in 1999, an international team of researchers reported that they had discovered the origins of HIV-1, the predominant strain of HIV in the developed world. A subspecies of chimpanzees native to west equatorial Africa had been identified as the original source of the virus. The researchers believe that HIV-1 was introduced into the human population when hunters became exposed to infected blood." For a slightly more detailed description of the discovery in 1999 of the chimp reservoir of the ancestral virus, please hit the following link. It is the first announcement of this discovery by the National Institutes of Health. http://www2.niaid.nih.gov/newsroom/releases/hivorigin.htm Cheers, Santosh
