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By Brody Levesque (Washington DC) Dec 23 | The owner of the chain of successful UK Gay Nightclubs, Ku Bar, Gary Henshaw, was interviewed by pinknews.com's Adam Lake regarding the establishment of a permanent memorial to victims of Aids. This memorial it has been suggested would be built in London
Henshaw told Lake that;
"AIDS and HIV have had a devastating effect on my Life. During the Nineties people I knew started dying and I was not used to young people dying.
In 2001 my closest friend Albert died, it was a terrible experience and only a couple of years later my other best friend Brendan died too.
It is on their birthdays, the anniversary of their deaths and on difficult days that people need a place to go. For me a memorial would symbolise their continued presence in my life."
Henshaw was also interviewed on HOMOVISION TV (UK) (Below) The comments section of the pinknews.com article seemed to indicate that while a noble idea at first glance, overall, it would be be unrealistic to honour the memory of AIDS victims by-passing victims of other diseases such as cancer. Article Here: http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2009/12/22/interview-why-we-need-a-london-aids-memorial/#
In the United States during the height of the AIDS pandemic in 1987, LGBT activist and former aide to Gay & Lesbian Civil Rights movement icon Harvey Milk; Cleave Jones, had created the AIDS Quilt which continues to attract attention from folks from all over in its permanent display in Atlanta, Georgia, or online at: http://www.aidsquilt.org/
Here is the video from HOMOVISION.TV UK:
http://video.aol.co.uk/video-detail/homovisiontv-homovisiontv-london-aids-memorial/1963837269
[Updated on: Wed, 23 December 2009 13:43] |
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I think there's probably a place for somewhere specific to comemorate those in the UK who died from AIDS in the 1980s and early 90's. But I don't think it has to be any kind of big or flashy memorial - and I certainly don't think the friends that I lost before HAART and combination therapies became available would want money spent on memorials rather than helping those currently living with the virus, or with basic research.
The AIDS Names quilt is fantastic - I worked to secure display of a section of the quilt in the place I worked at in Scotland in the late 1990s. It was an interesting experience - we'd had assorted Scottish Quilters conferences and events over the previous few years, and some really in-depth conversations occurred between our regular little-old-lady-quilter patrons and some of those out-and-very-visible gay men presenting and curating the AIDS quilt. It was, I think, a deeply learning and liberating experience for all concerned.
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night devoid of stars." Martin Luther King
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... on this topic before answering you; with my taking large license, in for want of a better word, a theory that I posit.
If, and I suggest if, a memorial were to be erected, I personally feel that it should be built in a city in the country where the whole damn thing is likely to have started in the first place, namely a city in Zaire, or whatever they are calling the place these days.
This would serve a two-fold purpose.
Firstly, and especially in light of all of the atrocities now being committed in Africa (and elsewhere) in the name of vanquishing the 'supposed' perpetrators and transmitters of the disease, this would declare for once and all time, this is not a "Gay" disease at all, but in all likelihood an act of warfare, and premeditated genocide. Secondly, it would better honour ALL VICTIMS of the disease, past, present and future, and there are going to continue to be tens of, if not hundreds of, millions more as the populations of Malawi, Zambia, Burundi, Rwanda, The Cameroon, The Gabon, Togo, Ghana and Zaire itself are further ravaged and decimated as a consequence of the former.
My rationale for taking this posture, to put not too fine a point upon it, is simply that the virus known Worldwide as HTLIV (Human T-cell Lymphotropic Immuno-Virus, and renamed in the late 1980's as AIDS, but also known in the mid-to-late 1970's as 'The Grip', 'The Crud', 'The Gay Baths' and 'Junkie's' disease, and a host of others, all in an attempt to explain the inexplicable phenomenon then sweeping North American Bathhouses and gay- and drug-related venues of the times) was likely created in a Biological Warfare laboratory in Reston, Virgina, sometime in 1952 or 1953. The World Health Organization (Headquarters in Brazzaville, Zaire), in the mid-1990's under then considerable pressure from Medical Authorities (these primarily being based in France) finally released documentary evidence (which has subsequently, and albeit rather conveniently, largely been ignored by the World community) that the earliest recorded victim of the disease had occurred sometime in (if I recall news-stories about the announcement correctly) 1957 or 1958 in the Katanga Province of the then Belgian Congo. They supported this claim with extant blood analysis of samples that had been taken during the period of the Congalese uprising against the Belgians in that region which illustrated a continuing occurrence, and rapid escalation, of the virus within a very short passage of time, but limited in scope to that alone of the area of the conflict.
A historical sidebar to this would be that in any consideration of the rationale behind quelling a rebellion, during this period and this region, it would be prudent to forget all and any consideration of 'Oil', with the prime motivator then being 'Tin', 'Copper' and 'Iron', all of which were yet to be unearthed in vast numbers in the Belgian and French controlled Territories of the Congalese River Basin, and all could potentially, and would, generate considerable wealth amongst the Mercantile classes of both Europe and North America. It would be years after the rebellion was put down, and Independence had been granted to the Nations of the region that the extent of the 'Oil' wealth of the Congalese River Basin would eventually become known.
Dag Hammarskjöld, then Secretary-General of The United Nations, and by all reports a quiet, tactful, and highly active Diplomat and Humanitarian, in all probability (and this is entirely speculation on my part) died in a fiery plane-crash in the then Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in 1961 because he had obtained some knowledge surrounding the true circumstances regarding the introduction of HTLIV into the water-table of the Congo River basin, and I assume, was likely about to blow the lid off this atrocity at a Press Conference he had ordered for the World Health Organization Headquarters.
What is known is that Mr. Hammarskjöld in mid-September, 1961, had only recently received, what is assumed to have been, catastrophic news from Brazzaville, prompting him to cancel all then scheduled State functions, with his immediately ordering the aforementioned Press Conference, and his traveling to The Congo. He likely died within 24-hours of his receiving that news.
In the year 2009, and with no pun intended, this is all, and rightly should be considered, 'water under the bridge', with those assumed to have been involved in any decision regarding the use of HTLIV in the Congo now long dead, and outside the reach of any future accountability. The virus has now mutated beyond any semblance of it's original form, there being 15, or more, known variants with the passage of some 60-years since its' first appearance.
With the emergence of widespread World-wide LGBT activism in the mid-1980's and massive fund-raising efforts pro-actively being taken to foster research into finding a 'cure' for HTLIV, and the attendant 'celebrity' associated with the that enterprise, it's not surprising that legal action by the U.S. Government then underway in a suburban Greater-Toronto area Municipality went unnoticed by World Media (although I do recall the front-page news story in the Toronto Star, with pictures of 'stock' on the warehouse shelves, but not the date, nor am I able to find reference to it today) in their attempt to muzzle, and put out of business, a small Canadian 'Biological' supplies house and repository. The picture, and the article in question, featured photographic and written evidence of boxes of vials of product labeled 'HTLIV' and others 'Antidote', each with the name of the Laboratory that created them, and the date of that creation. Why this little-known company would have had a supply of the Biological is beyond belief and adequate explanation. What is known is that the U. S. Government went to extreme lengths to quelch all knowledge of its' existence, and further to stop that company's cross-border distribution of the biological for research purposes, which was legal under Canadian Law, but not American. Needless to say, the company didn't want to go out of business, which is what had prompted the news story in the first place, with all further mention of the story ceasing with the application of a Canadian 'D-notice' applying to any further reporting of the story by the Media of the day. Too, I rather doubt that any judicious World-wide application, at that time, of the apparent 'Antidote' would have any discernable effect upon the rapidly mutating virus; thirty-years, or more, had passed since its' creation; but, widespread knowledge of its' existence and provenance would have definitely blown the lid of Ronald Regan's and his Government's abject denial of the virus, and blatant refusal to commit funding into its' research. As a further sidebar to all this, I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn, that this same 'Antidote' may well have been at the heart of much of the current Worldwide research into finding a cure, and that its' being the catalyst behind The Thalidomide Company's own vaccine, now in it's third wave of trials in South-east Asia, as has been reported in a thread elsewhere here at APOS, and widely in the Media.
Whether I personal believe that an atrocity on a scale never before heard of in human history actually occurred with the introduction of HTLIV in the late 1950's, or not, the greater injustice are in the numbers being reported, and just who actually represents the real and true 'victims'. Much is made of the North American, and European casualties, with a clock continuing it's deathly toll by the hour; but, the untold hundreds of millions of African and Asian victims never seem to ever get counted, or if they are at all, only peripherally, and then simply as an afterthought; they are in the minds' eye of most North Americans and Europeans, after all is said and done and truth be told, simply the great unwashed ... illiterate, coloured, and by their estimation unworthy of their consideration. Which is why I think the 'Memorial', if such a structure were to be build, should be located where I have proposed. The dead, or dying, of the Congolese River Basin, and it's tributaries, and dead, or dying, populations of it's neighbours deserve better.
Warren C. E. Austin
The Gay Deceiver
Toronto, Canada
BRODY PLEASE NOTE:
I, in my person, am the repository of the only existing 'Travan Tape Backups' holding the only known archives of a local Toronto 1980's and early 1990's BBS which functioning through the then 'fidonet' and 'glbnet' catalogued, and archived, all then known information about AIDS held by the AIDS Committee of Toronto and PLWA Foundation. Amongst these tapes, should anyone ever again consider 'mirroring' the original BBS, will be found thousands upon thousands of legacy software, and sundry other files and features, not the least of these being the extant archives of the two agencies I mention. To the best of my knowledge every truth, innuendo, fiction, and otherwise, about AIDS and it's ravages, during the period the BBS was in operation, are to be found here. If you were interesting in researching any potential story about AIDS, and the time period in question, I would more than willingly surrender these tapes to you. You would require nearly 1 Terabyte of disk-space spread across 3 hard-disks equally, all formatted FAT32, and functioning under a dual MS-DOS/Windows NT (version 4.0 SP6) environment to recompile and reconstitute the BBS in it's entirety. A knowledge of the MAXIS BBS System (created by a teen-aged youth then residing in Kingston, Ontario), although not a necessity, would be an asset. I can supply both MS-DOS and Windows NT 4.0 on original media should that too be necessary.
An e-Mail sent to warrenceaustin@ any of the 'major' web-portals will find me.
/WCEA
[Updated on: Mon, 28 December 2009 19:33]
"... comme recherché qu'un délice callipygian"
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Dear Warren, I appreciate your most gracious and generous offer for access to your archives. Thank you.
Now, as I read your post, it became apparent that I needed to refute some of the statements/declarations that you made regarding the human immunodeficiency virus in terms of origins and the spread of the pathogen.
I have a deeply personal stake in the ongoing battle against HIV-AIDS as I have lost dear friends in the course of this pandemic. I've also spent countless hours researching, interviewing, and fact checking with experts in the fields of epidemiology, virology,immunology, and infectious diseases both here in the United States, at home in Canada, and overseas. These include the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, and the prestigious Pasteur Institute in Paris, France.
[This may tend to be quite lengthy, so please bear with me.]
The first recognised cases of AIDS occurred in the USA in the early 1980's. A number of gay men in New York and California suddenly began to develop rare opportunistic infections and cancers that seemed stubbornly resistant to any treatment. At this time, AIDS did not yet have a name, but it quickly became obvious that all the men were suffering from a common syndrome.
The discovery of HIV, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, was made soon after. While some were initially resistant to acknowledge the connection (and indeed some remain so today), there is now clear evidence to prove that HIV causes AIDS. So, in order to find the source of AIDS, it is necessary to look for the origin of HIV, and find out how, when and where HIV first began to cause disease in humans.
HIV is a lentivirus, and like all viruses of this type, it attacks the immune system. Lentiviruses are in turn part of a larger group of viruses known as retroviruses. The name 'lentivirus' literally means 'slow virus' because they take such a long time to produce any adverse effects in the body. They have been found in a number of different animals, including cats, sheep, horses and cattle. However, the most interesting lentivirus in terms of the investigation into the origins of HIV is the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV) that affects monkeys.
It is now generally accepted that HIV is a descendant of a Simian Immunodeficiency Virus because certain strains of SIVs bear a very close resemblance to HIV-1 and HIV-2, the two types of HIV.
HIV-2 for example corresponds to SIVsm, a strain of the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus found in the sooty mangabey (also known as the White-collared monkey), which is indigenous to western Africa.
The more virulent, pandemic strain of HIV, namely HIV-1, was until recently more difficult to place. Until 1999, the closest counterpart that had been identified was SIVcpz, the SIV found in chimpanzees. However, this virus still had certain significant differences from HIV.
In February 1999 a group of researchers from the University of Alabama announced that they had found a type of SIVcpz that was almost identical to HIV-1. This particular strain was identified in a frozen sample taken from a captive member of the sub-group of chimpanzees known as Pan troglodytes troglodytes (P. t. troglodytes), which were once common in west-central Africa.
The researchers (led by Paul Sharp of Nottingham University and Beatrice Hahn of the University of Alabama) made the discovery during the course of a 10-year long study into the origins of the virus. They claimed that this sample proved that chimpanzees were the source of HIV-1, and that the virus had at some point crossed species from chimps to humans.
The most commonly accepted theory is that of the 'hunter'. In this scenario, SIVcpz was transferred to humans as a result of chimps being killed and eaten or their blood getting into cuts or wounds on the hunter. Normally the hunter's body would have fought off SIV, but on a few occasions it adapted itself within its new human host and become HIV-1. The fact that there were several different early strains of HIV, each with a slightly different genetic make-up (the most common of which was HIV-1 group M), would support this theory: every time it passed from a chimpanzee to a man, it would have developed in a slightly different way within his body, and thus produced a slightly different strain.
An professional medical article published in 2004, showed how retroviral transfer from primates to hunters is still occurring even today. In a sample of 1099 individuals in Cameroon , they discovered ten (1%) were infected with SFV (Simian Foamy Virus), an illness which, like SIV, was previously thought only to infect primates. All these infections were believed to have been acquired through the butchering and consumption of monkey and ape meat. Discoveries such as this have led to calls for an outright ban on bushmeat hunting to prevent simian viruses being passed to humans.
During the last few years it has become possible not only to determine whether HIV is present in a blood or plasma sample, but also to determine the particular subtype of the virus. Studying the subtype of virus of some of the earliest known instances of HIV infection can help to provide clues about the time it first appeared in humans and its subsequent evolution.
Four of the earliest known instances of HIV infection are as follows:
1. A plasma sample taken in 1959 from an adult male living in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
2. A lymph node sample taken in 1960 from an adult female, also from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
3. HIV found in tissue samples from an American teenager who died in St. Louis in 1969.
4. HIV found in tissue samples from a Norwegian sailor who died around 1976.
A 1998 analysis of the plasma sample from 1959 suggested that HIV-1 was introduced into humans around the 1940s or the early 1950s.
In January 2000, the results of a new study suggested that the first case of HIV-1 infection occurred around 1931 in West Africa. This estimate (which had a 15 year margin of error) was based on a complex computer model of HIV's evolution.
However, a study in 2008 dated the origin of HIV to between 1884 and 1924, much earlier than previous estimates. The researchers compared the viral sequence from 1959 (the oldest known HIV-1 specimen) to the newly discovered sequence from 1960. They found a significant genetic difference between them, demonstrating diversification of HIV-1 occurred long before the AIDS pandemic was recognised.
The authors suggest a long history of the virus in Africa and call Kinshasa the “epicentre of the HIV/AIDS pandemic” in West Africa. They propose the early spread of HIV was concurrent with the development of colonial cities, in which crowding of people increased opportunities for transmission.
In May 2003, a group of Belgian researchers led by Dr. Anne-Mieke Vandamme, published a report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. By analysing samples of the two different subtypes of HIV-2 (A and B) taken from infected individuals and SIV samples taken from sooty mangabeys, Dr Vandamme concluded that subtype A had passed into humans around 1940 and subtype B in 1945 (plus or minus 16 years or so). Her team of researchers also discovered that the virus had originated in Guinea-Bissau and that its spread was most likely precipitated by the independence war that took place in the country between 1963 and 1974 (Guinea-Bissau is a former Portuguese colony). Her theory was backed up by the fact that the first European cases of HIV-2 were discovered among Portuguese veterans of the war, many of whom had received blood transfusions or unsterile injections following injury, or had possibly had relationships with local women.
The question of exactly where the transfer of HIV to humans took place, and where the 'epidemic' officially first developed has always been controversial. Some have suggested that it is dangerous to even try to find out, as AIDS has frequently been blamed on an innocent person or group of individuals in the past. However, scientists remain keen to find the true origin of HIV, as most agree it is important to understand the virus and its epidemiology in order to fight it.
Given the evidence we have already looked at, it seems highly likely that Africa was indeed the continent where the transfer of HIV to humans first occurred (monkeys from Asia and South America have never been found to have SIVs that could cause HIV in humans).
In May 2006, the same group of researchers who first identified the Pan troglodytes troglodytes strain of SIVcpz, announced that they had narrowed down the location of this particular strain to wild chimpanzees found in the forests of Southern Cameroon. By analysing 599 samples of chimp droppings (P. T. troglodytes are a highly endangered and thus protected species that cannot be killed or captured for testing), the researchers were able to obtain 34 specimens that reacted to a standard HIV DNA test, 12 of which gave results that were virtually indistinguishable from the reactions created by human HIV. The researchers therefore concluded that the chimpanzees found in this area were highly likely the origin of both the pandemic Group M of HIV-1 and of the far rarer Group N. The exact origins of Group O however remain unknown.
HIV Group N principally affects people living in South-central Cameroon, so it is not difficult to see how this outbreak started. Group M, the group that has caused the worldwide pandemic, was however first identified in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is not entirely clear how it transferred from Cameroon to Kinshasa, but the most likely explanation is that an infected individual traveled south down the Sangha river that runs through Southern Cameroon to the River Congo and then on to Kinshasa, where the Group M epidemic probably began.
Just as we do not know exactly who spread the virus from Cameroon to Kinshasa, how the virus spread from Africa to America is also not entirely clear. However, recent evidence suggests that the virus may have arrived via the Caribbean island of Haiti.
In March 2007 however, it returned to the public eye at the Fourteenth Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Los Angeles. A group of international scientists presented data based on complex genetic analysis of 122 early samples of HIV-1, group M, subtype B (the most common strain found in the USA and in Haiti) showing that the strain had probably been brought to Haiti from Africa by a single person in around 1966; a time when many Haitians would have been returning from working in the Congo.
Genetic analysis then showed that subtype B spread slowly from person to person on the island, before being transferred to the US, again probably by a single individual, at some point between 1969 and 1972. A paper published in October 2007 by Worobey and colleagues gave a 99.7% certainty that HIV subtype B originated in Haiti before passing to the US.
It is possible that HIV had entered the US several times before subtype B took a firm hold (which would explain the infection of the St. Louis teenager in the early to mid-1960s), but it was the late 1960s / early 1970s transfer that is believed to be responsible for the widespread epidemic seen in the US today. Once the virus had established itself in the gay community, in would have spread fairly rapidly (anal intercourse carries a very high transmission risk), with transmission occurring within and between the US and Haiti, and internationally, until the original route taken by the virus was largely obscured
Both national and international travel undoubtedly had a major role in the initial spread of HIV. In the US, international travel by young men making the most of the gay sexual revolution of the late 70s and early 80s would certainly have played a large part in taking the virus worldwide. In Africa, the virus would probably have been spread along truck routes and between towns and cities within the continent itself. However, it is quite conceivable that some of the early outbreaks in African nations were not started by Africans infected with the 'original' virus at all, but by people visiting from overseas where the epidemic had been growing too. The process of transmission in a global pandemic is simply too complex to blame on any one group or individual.
Much was made in the early years of the epidemic of a so-called 'Patient Zero' who was the basis of a complex "transmission scenario" compiled by Dr. William Darrow and colleagues at the Centre for Disease Control in the US. This epidemiological study showed how 'Patient O' (mistakenly identified in the press as 'Patient Zero') had given HIV to multiple partners, who then in turn transmitted it to others and rapidly spread the virus to locations all over the world. A journalist, Randy Shilts, subsequently wrote a book based on Darrow's findings, which named Patient Zero as a gay Canadian flight attendant called Gaetan Dugas. For several years, Dugas was vilified as a 'mass spreader' of HIV and the original source of the HIV epidemic among gay men. However, four years after the publication of Shilts' article, Dr. Darrow repudiated his study, admitting its methods were flawed and that Shilts' had misrepresented its conclusions.
While Gaetan Dugas was a real person who did eventually die of AIDS, the Patient Zero story was not much more than myth and scaremongering. HIV in the US was to a large degree initially spread by gay men, but this occurred on a huge scale over many years, probably a long time before Dugas even began to travel.
As blood transfusions became a routine part of medical practice, an industry to meet this increased demand for blood began to develop rapidly. In some countries such as the USA , donors were paid to give blood, a policy that often attracted those most desperate for cash; among them intravenous drug users. In the early stages of the epidemic, doctors were unaware of how easily HIV could be spread and blood donations remained unscreened. This blood was then sent worldwide, and unfortunately most people who received infected donations went on to become HIV positive themselves.
In the late 1960's haemophiliacs also began to benefit from the blood clotting properties of a product called Factor VIII. However, to produce this coagulant, blood from hundreds of individual donors had to be pooled. This meant that a single donation of HIV+ blood could contaminate a huge batch of Factor VIII. This put thousands of haemophiliacs all over the world at risk of HIV, and many subsequently became infected with the virus.
The 1970s saw an increase in the availability of heroin following the Vietnam War and other conflicts in the Middle East , which helped stimulate a growth in intravenous drug use. This increased availability and together with the development of disposable plastic syringes and the establishment of 'shooting galleries' where people could buy drugs and rent equipment, provided another route through which the virus could be passed on.
It is likely that we will never know who the first person was to be infected with HIV, or exactly how it spread from that initial person. Scientists investigating the possibilities often become very attached to their individual 'pet' theories and insist that theirs is the only true answer, but the spread of AIDS could quite conceivably have been induced by a combination of many different events.
Whether through injections, travel, wars, colonial practices or genetic engineering, the realities of the 20th Century have undoubtedly had a major role to play. Nevertheless, perhaps a more pressing concern for scientists today should not be how the AIDS epidemic originated, but how those it affects can be treated, how the further spread of HIV can be prevented and how the world can change to ensure a similar pandemic never occurs again.
[Updated on: Mon, 28 December 2009 23:18] |
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... and the others here.
I too, like you, have had an extremely personal stake in the topic of AIDS, although unlike you, with the passage of, and my having buried, in 2000, the last of the some 40-odd friends (over a span of nearly twenty-years) from the ravages of the disease, I have not kept abreast of more rrecent and significantly relevant information.
For more than 10-years now, I have simply, and only, questioned why it is that I survived this scourge when so many others of my acquaintance, all of whom were far worthier than I, did not.
To not put too fine a point on this, I was the consummate whore in my middle youth, living the supposed gay 'vita loca' to the fullest, with nary a responsible thought lingering long enough between my ears to gather dust let alone any cognitive understanding of what was really going on around me.
Any 'valid' information I might have, or thought I have had, about the origins of the disease ceased with that interest a decade or more ago; and I find indications that the disease, in truth, predates 1957 or thereabouts, and the probability that it may have been around for many decades, undetected prior to that, most interesting and especially relevant.
So Brody, I'll put any thoughts that I might have considered, or harboured, (although I did qualify these as being speculation on my part, and not on the part of others) about mass genocide to bed, and move on.
I do find it somewhat credulous (although I don't know why) that "we" continue to this day to date the disease from the early 1980's. As both a vested financial interest, and Director, in a large gay bath-house operation in Canada throughout the 1970's, and hearing as I would 'news' coming out of similar, and companion, operations in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans and Los Angeles, I personally knew of its' recurring presence as early as 1975 (albeit under a variety of names as we tried to explain it), this being in large part responsible for my own having abandoned my "tubbing" days, and my becoming more circumspect in all liaisons of a sexual nature thereafter. Too, my not being at all consumed by either drugs or alcohol might have had something to do with it as well.
Probably the only relatively recent snip-it of information I was aware of was the piece about the rather beleaguered Gaetan Dugas, and his having been cleared of his likely having been 'patient zero'; but, that too, has probably been of some widespread knowledge for a decade or more. Although much, but not all, of the viral genealogy you cite I recall having skimmed at one time or another in these intervening years, more interesting to me, is that there now appears to be four or more genus' of the root-virus, each with a considerable number of variants. I really must get out more, I'm thinking.
I do find frightening in all its' implications the information about 'Factor VIII' and the documented instance of the youth in 1969. Did this show up years later like the Congolese instances, or did they know about this in early 1970's?
If, as you document and I have no reason not to believe you, the disease likely originated in West-central Africa, or Central Africa, in the mid-1930's, with the earliest likely instance that being of the individual I had mentioned (and whom in all probability had contracted the disease as much as 15-years earlier), and you further document (although I got the year wrong) then my original suggestion that any 'Memorial' should be sited and built in the Congo still remains relevant, and likely could, and would, still stand lasting testament to the memory of AIDS victims Worldwide.
The offer of the tapes continues, if for no other reason that the oddity of understanding how little was understood at the height of the worst of the epidemic.
Too, I would still like answers to the question of that 'D-notice' and why that company had the virus at all in the late-1980's, and whether, or not, that laboratory in Reston, Virgina, recreated what was then an already known pathogen in 1952 or thereabouts.
Warren C. E. Austin
The Gay Deceiver
Toronto, Canada
"... comme recherché qu'un délice callipygian"
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Hello again Warren~
There are volumes of notes and interviews I've made over the years regarding the pandemic and as a result, what I posted was an odd bits & pieces synopsis of the historical overview as commonly accepted by the experts at the CDC and elsewhere. It was by no means meant to be comprehensive as I'm fairly certain Tim might get slightly arsed if I suddenly published a full blown treatise on the subject in the forum eh?
Okay, to answer the Reston question. I've heard that before over the years Warren and it's science fiction and conjecture as far as HIV-AIDS research goes. Here's why:
Reston, Virginia in Western Fairfax County was conceived as a planned community by Robert E. Simon. It was founded on April 20, 1964, Simon's 50th birthday. Reston is an unincorporated planned community overseen by powerful community homeowners' associations which provide municipal services offsetting those provided by the county of Fairfax.[ Police & Fire & EMS ] Reston gets its name from the initial's of its founder; R E S and 'ton to signify town.
Now, the incident you are referring to, actually had to do with another powerful pathogen, the Ebola virus and a close relative of it. There was a lab under contract to the government of the United States, specifically the CDC and the NIH, that was working with research into that particular virus. While investigating on an outbreak of Simian hemorrhagic fever (SHFV) in the November of 1989, an electron microscopist from USAMRIID discovered filoviruses similar in appearance to Ebola in tissue samples taken from Crab-eating Macaque imported from the Philippines to Hazleton Laboratories in Reston, Virginia. The filovirus was further isolated by Dr. Peter B. Jahrling, and over the period of three months over a third of the monkeys died—at a rate two or three a day.
Blood samples were taken from 178 animal handlers during the incident. Of them, six eventually became seroconverted[B] and tested positive for a filovirus antigen using the ELISA test. They remained asymptomatic. In January 1990, an animal handler at Hazelton cut himself while performing a necropsy on the liver of an infected Cynomolgus. Under the direction of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) the animal handler was placed under surveillance for the duration of the incubation period. When the animal handler failed to become ill, it was concluded that the virus had a low pathogenicity to humans.
This attracted significant media attention, including the making of the film: Outbreak, which was based on The Hot Zone; a best-selling 1994 non-fiction bio-thriller by Richard Preston about the origins of incidents involving hemorrhagic fevers and both the Ebola and Marburg viruses. The filovirus was named after the community.[ Reston ebolavirus ] The monkeys suspected of the virus were euthanised and the facility was sterilised.
The facility was located at 1946 Isaac Newton Square in an office park off of Sunset Hills Road. It was eventually torn down and a daycare was built in its place.
So, interesting yes, HIV-AIDS related? Nope.
I hope that answers your questions.
Below is a picture of a statue of Reston Founder Robert E. Simon @ Lake Anne Plaza in the town that bears his initials.
[Updated on: Tue, 29 December 2009 02:52] |
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