I recently watched a program about the people who live in Eyam, Derbyshire
who are direct descendents of people who survived the plague (which, by the
way, swept across Europe on more than one occasion, killing millions). Some
people got sick, but recovered and some never contracted it. It was
discovered that these family members had a high reading of Delta 8 (I think
it was called) which has the effect of inhibiting disease. Tests were then
done on other chunks of the population to find out how widespread Delta 8 is
in the population. I don't remember the percentages but in the black
community it is virtually unknown which is why Aids has hit African
countries so hard.
Yeah, well... In addition to sweeping through *Europe* a couple of times (in the documented "memory"), the bubonic plague had been a scourge of the *African* continent even earlier (though only the Arabs -- in the North -- were literate enough to document it and propose treatment). Presumably, some of those communities also had survivors (and, by inference, "improved genetics")...
While there *are* some genetic differences (other than the -- obvious -- surface ones, of course) between Caucasians, Asians and Africans (Caucasians are the least likely to have milk-allergies, for example; Europan Jews are more likely to carry and pass on the Tay-Sachs, etc), the most obvious reason for AIDS having hit Africa harder than anywhere else is the lack of medical care available to North America or even Western Europe.
There's no doubt but that some people are more prone to "catching something" than others; I've always been the "sickly duckling" in my childhood but I had -- in the first few years in the US (have lost all interest in gardening since <g>) -- constructed a "shade garden" under our old oak tree, pulling out (bare-handed) all sorts of weeds to make room for my lily-of-the-valley, wood hyacinths, etc. Some of those weeds -- as I learnt later -- were poison ivy. *I* never got a blister, but my stepson #2 would swell up like a pig just passing within 3yards of the treee (a reaction I get from most painkillers)... But both he and I are Caucasians, so *race* wasn't in question.
It is, IMO, more intriguing to watch the demographics of the spread of the disease; in US, it had been -- originally -- a "male gay thing". I still remember the: "it's only gays and Haitians" -- which soooo reminded me of an old Polish joke, which *also* played on a faulty but common "constans": "everything is the fault of Jews and bicyclists". "Why bicyclists???" "Why Jews???" -- when the first cases came to light.
In US, the preponderance of AIDS is, ineed, among (male) homosexuals (or had been until about 10 yrs ago; we now have children who'd been HIV-infefcted in the womb), with the second group being druggies, who traded needles. Since neither of the groups is "mainstream", it was easy enough to ignore them (on the same principle as: "let the gangsters kill one another; who cares"). The early cases of infected women and children were "blown off" on the same basis: "bi-sexuals, and serves them right". It took years, and infected blood-transfusions, to get US (and most of Europe) up in arms about the "innocent victims", and trying to combat the disease...
But, in Africa, it's a bit different; there, from the start, the disease spread throughout the entire societies (men, wmen and children alike), even in communities which never saw a needle (not even to innoculate against, say, polio). So, the question arises: is the attitude in Africa more relaxed towards bi-sexual relationships than it is in the "civilised world", with people having more freedom to move between the two "options" (like in the ancient Greece or ancient China) without having to "declare" oneself?
Off my soap box for the night, and apologies. But I have lost some of my best friends to AIDS, and it's become just one more "sore point" with me, *especially since* the atitude towards it seems to gather *all* the prejudices I've witnessed for the past 50 yrs, and hurl them against humanity as one flaming ball...
----- Tamara P Duvall Lexington, Virginia, USA Formerly of Warsaw, Poland http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd/
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