The 16-year-old boy had the kind of illness that wouldn’t be familiar to doctors for years: He was weak and emaciated, rife with stubborn infections and riddled with rare cancerous lesions known as Kaposi’s sarcoma, a skin disease found in elderly men of Mediterranean descent. The boy, Robert Rayford, died on May 15, 1969, in St. Louis... With a sense that something important could someday be learned, two doctors collected tissue samples after his death and froze them for almost 20 years....
In 1985, when a test became available that could detect HIV antibodies, Elvin-Lewis packed some of her long-held samples in dry ice and shipped them to Witte, who had them tested by Robert Garry, a Tulane virologist. Garry tested for nine distinct HIV proteins. Rayford’s blood showed evidence of all nine.
“Case Shakes Theories of AIDS Origin,” read a Chicago Tribune story that broke news of the results in October 1987. “Area Teen May Have Died from AIDS—In 1969,” said a banner headline in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The tests on Rayford’s tissues astonished researchers. The finding wouldn’t change how the disease was treated, but it challenged the conventional wisdom of how it arrived.....
May 15, 2019
50 years ago today — Robert Rayford died, perhaps the earliest known victim of the disease that would become known as AIDS.
From "A mystery illness killed a boy in 1969. Years later, doctors learned what it was: AIDS/Robert Rayford challenged the narrative about the epidemic" (WaPo):
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So, not Reagan's fault after all.
I will read this but my innate skeptic got red flagged by this vague sentence: "Garry tested for nine distinct HIV proteins. Rayford’s blood showed evidence of all nine."
Actually I'm out of free WaPo articles. Seems like a very interesting story though.
Another stake through the heart of the Patient 0 hypothesis.
Probably Trump's fault.
We often assume the Ancients were morons, and maybe they didn't know that the anus is not biologically evolved to protect against sexually transmitted diseases the way the vagina is. But you have to think they could recognize patterns and decide that after half the hunters in the tribe withered away to some strange disease, maybe there should be some tribal laws put in place to shun men who practiced anal sex.
Kinda like after the 3rd time all the women in the tribe got that gross infection that left them all barren: "Hey Bob, no more sticking it into your sheep before you come home to your 3 women. And the rest of you stick to your own tent when Bob is out in the fields"
If only there was a political philosophy that could conserve the ideas that are learned from generations of trial and error, so we don't keep repeating them. Not sure what we would call it...
STDs in animals and humans have a historical relationship. "Two or three of the major STDs have come from animals," says Alonso Aguirre, a veterinarian and vice president for conservation medicine at Wildlife Trust. "We know, for example, that gonorrhea came from cattle to humans. Syphilis also came to humans from cattle or sheep many centuries ago, possibly sexually." The most recent, as well as the deadliest, STD to migrate to humans is HIV, which hunters acquired from the blood of chimpanzees, says Aguirre.
http://discovermagazine.com/2008/sep/09-how-often-do-animals-get-stds
If it feels good and you aren't harming anyone... well hold on a sec.
"We often assume the Ancients were morons, and maybe they didn't know that the anus is not biologically evolved to protect against sexually transmitted diseases the way the vagina is. But you have to think they could recognize patterns and decide that after half the hunters in the tribe withered away to some strange disease, maybe there should be some tribal laws put in place to shun men who practiced anal sex."
What "Ancients" do you refer to? Many "ancients" engaged in homosexual anal sex, (and heterosexual anal sex, no doubt).
If only there was a political philosophy that could conserve the ideas that are learned from generations of trial and error, so we don't keep repeating them. Not sure what we would call it...
'Common sense' would seem appropriate.
Scott Adams says President Trump has cured AIDS. That may, or may not, be hyperbole.
What PDJT has done is convince Gilead Pharma to donate, free, 200,000 doses of their AIDS preventive.
Gilead's big gift to Trump's HIV strategy
By DAN DIAMOND (ddiamond@politico.com; @ddiamond)
05/10/2019 10:00 AM EDT
With help from Alice Miranda Ollstein, Victoria Colliver and Adam Cancryn
Editor's Note: This edition of Pulse is published
— Gilead is donating enough HIV prevention medicine to treat 200,000 at-risk people for more than a decade, part of a joint effort with the Trump administration to effectively end the HIV outbreak.
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-pulse/2019/05/10/gileads-big-gift-to-trumps-hiv-strategy-617339
Normal price of the drug, Truvada is $20m/yr per patient.
This should be huge.
But, you know, "Orange man bad"
DICK, our resident fopdoodle and LLR will no doubt have some reason to be unhappy about it.
John Henry
In 1983 I was offered a post-doctoral fellowship in the Laboratory of Pathology at he National Institutes of Health to study a particular family of viruses. In the same department, AIDS patients and cadavers were being studied to determine the etiology of AIDS (HIV had not been discovered or shown to be the cause). I accepted a home dinner invitation from a professor doing a sabbatical in the department, and he asked me to join him in leaving our shoes on the porch as a precaution. Despite having many friends in that lab at NIH, it creeped me out despite having done my PhD on a viral disease spread by mosquitoes. I opted instead for a post-doc at UW-Madison, and never looked back. Met my wife of 31 years and counting when she came to my lab to sell me radioisotopes, and miss the Brauthaus (whose commercial spokeswoman worked in the lab one floor down). Memories...
"If it feels good and you aren't harming anyone..."
Bush meat...Africans got hiv from eating bush meat (chimp).
That's the official story anyway.
Sez here that AIDS was caused by colonialism:
"[AIDS] likely began during a period of oppressive colonialism in Africa, when many bushman were forced deeper into the jungle and resorted to hunting less desirable meat, like that of chimpanzees."
Many "ancients" engaged in homosexual anal sex, (and heterosexual anal sex, no doubt).
It's nice to have Cookie as an expert. Did they have bathhouses in Athens, Cookie ?
Sez here that global climate change is bad for AIDS guys:
"Global climate change exacerbated by human energy use threatens to have a profound impact on human health, including from infectious diseases. Particularly vulnerable populations include the immunocompromised, including persons with HIV infection."
If untreated, the median time from acquisition of HIV to death from AIDS is eight years. In the 80’s, we did see a few teens die from AIDS. They did not catch it when they were over the age of consent. A sixteen year old who dies from AIDS was almost certainly raped as a child. No one ever seems to see this obvious point.
That reminds me of poor Rock Hudson. Dead at 60 from AIDS. IRC, he went on Doris Day's chat show, and talked about his illness, although I don't think AIDS was ever mentioned.
I'd actually heard of Rock Hudson being Gay before that, because a Gay guy in our dorm talked about going to "sex parties" at Rock's house. Frankly, i didn't believe it. Which showed how naive i was.
At the time, I thought of Rock Hudson as "Macmillan and wife" - that he was a movie star in the 50s and 60s meant nothing to me.
Pedophilia has been around for a long time, too.
The Post article appears to be based solely on a couple of 1980s articles in the Chicago Tribune and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch — in other words, it’s even less scientific than my low expectations predicted.
I'm sure most have read it, but And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts is a gripping and fascinating look at the spread of the HIV virus, the reluctance of the gay community to alter their behavior and the political wrangling between health agencies. A page turner. Shilts, himself, was gay and died of AIDS.
The transmission of HIV was and is still primarily about sexually liberal behaviors and sexual relations that normalize transgender vectors.
The ancients, with exceptions for sects and individuals with socially liberal orientations, were indeed smarter. Perhaps their knowledge was lost and recovered in the interim.
the anus is not biologically evolved to protect against sexually transmitted diseases the way the vagina is
The rectum is part of the digestive system, and evolved to absorb nutrients in its passage. A well designed vector for transmitting antigens including, as it turned out, HIV.
You know something we don't hear much about anymore is heterosexual AIDS in Africa.
20 years ago this was a huge thing. It afflicted as much as 50% of the sub-Saharan African population. This heterosexual AIDS was gonna jump the ocean and kill us all.
What most people did not realize was that the diagnosis of AIDS in Africa was different from Europe, US and other first world countries.
Here, if you were HIV positive and had any of about 30 different diseases like TB or Kaposi's you had AIDS. No HIV? You were still just as sick but there was no AIDS.
In Africa, because they did not have good access to HIV testing, the World Health Organization developed what they called the "Bangui Diagnosis" after a conference held in Bangui, Central African Republic.
I forget the symptoms but they were things like swollen joints, persistent diahrhea, persistent vomiting and the like. If you had 4 of them, you were diagnosed with AIDS. No test was done for HIV.
AIDS death reporting also exaggerated the numbers. In many cases someone who died, having been diagnosed with AIDS, was counted as having died of AIDS. For example, there were cases of AIDS patients being killed in auto accidents and their death being attributed to AIDS. They may have died with AIDS in that case. They did not die of AIDS.
But, because it scared the bejeezus out of rich Americans, the African countries milked it for all it was worth.
When the finally got wide access to HIV testing, the incidence of actual AIDS dropped off dramatically.
I don't want to minimize the suffering of these people. They were getting and dying from horrible diseases. But, in most cases, they were not AIDS. They were the same horrible diseases that Africans have been dying of for millenia.
I don't even blame them for using the AIDS scare to try to get some help. If it was my family or my people dying and I have a tool I can use to get some relief, you better believe I'm gonna use it.
I don't even blame Bush for buying into it. He probably knew what was going on but wanted to help sick Africans because he was a good human being. If he can use AIDS to pry some more money out of Congress, I can understand.
John Henry
Blogger mockturtle said...
Pedophilia has been around for a long time, too.
Including in Nancy Pelosi's family if this story from the NY Times of 12/12/53 is to be believed:
Baltimore,Dec.11(UP)- A Baltimore city grand jury recommended today that Franklin D. Roosevelt D'Alesandro, son of Baltimore's Mayor, be prosecuted for lying during his recent rape trial. The grand jury also recommended that an indictment be drawn against James Pollack, long-time Democratic political leader, for trying to obstruct justice during the trial in which the youth won acquittal. The grand jury made its recommendations in which presentments, which in this state precede the issuance of indictments. D'Alesandro, 20-year-old son of Mayor Thomas D'Alesandro, was charged, with more than a dozen other youths, of moral charges in two girls, ages 11 and 13.
https://nalert.blogspot.com/2018/09/flashback-was-nancy-pelosis-brother.html
Nancy still defends him in this Tweet from yesterday:
No American should face discrimination for who they are or who they love. It’s time to make the #EqualityAct the law of the land!
https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi/status/1128395312035454977/photo/1
Emph in both quoted sections added.
John Henry
My note on African AIDS was from memory. I am sure I have some of the details wrong but I stand by the gist of the comment.
John Henry
Welcome back to the Alpha Centari Network.
(select "learn" to upload data memory)
X20213 has burned his findings from the last Archeological Expedition to Prime that may overwrite the oral histories of the Fall of Merica. After the glamour discovery of an intact and primitive aqueduct, trace elements of female hormones found unfiltered in the local water supply which may have been responsible for the rise of female hybrids (101x) that were ineffectual in defending against the Second Onslaught of the God Emperor Xerxes. This may account for the mysterious disappearance of the Spartan Tribes several hundred years earlier. In short, the Merican Federation stopped producing biological males capable of defending the Thermopylae pass. The medicines that led to the sexual liberation of their females inadvertently emasculated their civilization.
If he can use AIDS to pry some more money out of Congress,
That's one of the apologies exploited by advocates and activists of catastrophic anthropogenic global cooling, warming, climate change. The crossover effect of these class of apologies as first-order forcings of catastrophic anthropogenic progressive corruption is well established. We should speak plainly in order to mitigate the risk of PC.
"[AIDS] likely began during a period of oppressive colonialism in Africa, when many bushman were forced deeper into the jungle and resorted to hunting less desirable meat, like that of chimpanzees."
My understanding is that AIDS in Africa was primarily spread via prostitution. Farmers would escort their crops into the cities for sale, visit the infected brothels, and then take the virus home to their wives.
Sure wish I could read the story. Oh, well.
I've been hearing about the St. Louis case for decades, but no one had proved it beyond a doubt.
The latest guess about the origins of HIV put it in Africa over a century ago. No one noticed.
JL: "The latest guess about the origins of HIV put it in Africa over a century ago. No one noticed."
They noticed, but there was no way to blame it on republicans so the story withered...
From the wikipedia ariticle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rayford
"The last known tissue samples of Rayford were accidentally destroyed in a New Orleans lab during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, preventing further testing."
Oh.
Uh, fake news? Unless there's something new in the article, we've known about this case and how inconclusive it is for over 30 years.
Cook: What "Ancients" do you refer to? Many "ancients" engaged in homosexual anal sex
One ancient even wrote about the signs of decline of civilizations, one of which was "an acceptance of homosexuality". But I'm sure he was just another ignorant homophobe.
Why so hostile Cook? Hmmmm....
Bush meat...Africans got hiv from eating bush meat (chimp). That's the official story anyway.
Yaahhh. I'm guessing that if primitive cultures were still mating with ancestors of Neanderthals, it might give ammunition to those who claim the races are not all the same, that some are "inferior".
"The first comparison of human and Neanderthal DNA shows that the two lineages diverged about 400,000 years ago and that Neanderthals may have had more DNA in common with chimps than with modern humans."
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10275-neanderthal-dna-illuminates-split-with-humans/
Which is silly, because we know that related theories about men and women being the same have been proven true in college athletics. Well, unless you are a sexist bigot. Better to cover that up with some PCBS, screw the science.
...looking back I'm beginning to wonder just how much our knowledge of African culture and history has been filtered through Political Correctness to thwart racism. Is the "Out of Africa" theory valid or just a prop to give Africans a participation trophy? Simultaneous and independent evolution in different areas of the world, as with other species, seems plausible too. I would never have entertained the idea, but the more I see science perverted by politics, the more I question what is "known"
Humans absolutely did mate with Neanderthals. And with other archaic homonids, too.
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/category/archaic-humans/neanderthals/
Cook: What "Ancients" do you refer to?
Well, I commented about tribes of hunters, but I did promise there would be no math.
https://www.history.com/topics/pre-history/hunter-gatherers
We do still have the Treatise of Gog where he opines: "Ragga Grah Grr Grah!"
I find his logic to be formidable.
Humans absolutely did mate with Neanderthals.
Right. My point was that discovery Africans were mating with descendants of Neanderthals might be covered up out of fears it would give ammunition to racist ideas they are subhuman.
I'm concerned that Anthropology has been perverted for political causes.
Is the "Out of Africa" theory valid or just a prop to give Africans a participation trophy?
That's been running around in my brain for awhile too.
I meet Neanderthals on the internet all the time.
Right. My point was that discovery Africans were mating with descendants of Neanderthals might be covered up out of fears it would give ammunition to racist ideas they are subhuman.
Actually, genetically, sub-Saharan Africans are the most human. Their genetic population has the least amount of non- Homo Sapiens DNA. Whites, Asians and Pacific Islanders have much more DNA from other hominids.
In the 80’s, we did see a few teens die from AIDS. They did not catch it when they were over the age of consent. A sixteen year old who dies from AIDS was almost certainly raped as a child. No one ever seems to see this obvious point.
Are you really this ignorant? Children and teens contracted HIV from blood transfusion, not sex. Most of them were hemophiliacs.
I'm concerned that Anthropology has been perverted for political causes.
Practically every other field has, so why not Anthropology?
This is another one of those stories that reemerges every few years, but with no actual evidence that Rayford had AIDS.
For what it is worth, I think one can probably be reasonably sure that AIDS has been around a long, long time (probably hundreds if not thousands of years), but never in a location where the medical system was advanced enough that doctors would see how some unexplained deaths were connected by something, and with the technology to determine what that something actually was.
Colonialism is likely to blame, but not because it suddenly made Africans into hunters. Africans have been hunting, including monkeys and apes, since forever. And the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) passes into humans by the "bushmeat" route pretty often; in modern villages that eat bushmeat, some sort of SIV antigens show up in almost 8% of the population.
But the human-to-human HIV strains are marked by their mutation rates as having diverged from ancestral SIV strains in the period between the Scramble for Africa and the development of antibiotic treatments for syphilis. At least three different versions of SIV (one chimpanzee SIV, one gorilla SIV, and one sooty mangabeys SIV), on the other hand, made the leap into becoming human immunodeficiency viruses during that time window.
In short, something happened in that time window that made it possible for versions of SIV that infected occasional monkey eaters into an actual human epidemic. That was likely the colonial cities. Colonial development created cities that had 80-20 male/female ratios, and thus were hotbeds of prostitution. And before the development of antibiotic treatments for syphilis, genital sores from syphilis were common in prostitutes. And that was the condition that allowed several related viruses to infect enough people to become a true human disease.
SIV didn't transition into a human-hosted disease before colonialism because you didn't have mass prostitution in Africa before it. And it hasn't transitioned after syphilis could be treated with antibiotics because without the sores, the likelihood of transmission of a new variety from its original victim in any given encounter was too low.
What was all that about CIA, germ warfare and AIDS conspiracy last century?
Actually, genetically, sub-Saharan Africans are the most human. Their genetic population has the least amount of non- Homo Sapiens DNA. Whites, Asians and Pacific Islanders have much more DNA from other hominids.
All that is true, except… the term hominid doesn't mean what you think it does. A “hominid” (i.e., a member of the biological family Hominidae) is any great ape: humans, yes — but also gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and all their (and our) now-extinct relations since the great apes diverged from other primates.
The correct term for all humans including our now-extinct relatives since the divergence from chimpanzees is hominin.
He pushed in the final stool.
Can Indiana Jones be blamed for SIV to AIDS?
He had himself some of that chilled monkey brain after all.
Thank you for posting this.
And while we are dispelling AIDS myths, let’s tackle one of the most notorious; no it didn’t start with someone in Africa having sex with a monkey. It likely began during a period of oppressive colonialism in Africa, when many bushman were forced deeper into the jungle and resorted to hunting less desirable meat, like that of chimpanzees.
I think that he might be more creating myths than dispelling them. I don’t know anybody who ever thought that AIDS came from sex with monkeys, I am sure there were a few, it’s a big country. The Belgians were certainly guilty of horrible things in their colonies, but to suggest that there is any possibility that we could know with any degree of certainty whatsoever that colonialism caused AIDs is laughable, if there were any laughing in this issue.
The most important thing here of course is to blame AIDS on white men, as long as they aren’t gay. There is nothing in the story that changes the narrative on AIDS by a single jot. The kid was victimized by pedophile men, that’ much seems pretty clear.
I once read a memoire of a 19th century ivory hunter. You know who he kept running into in his forays into the densest jungles, where he was cutting the roads? Islam. The slave trade was over by that point, but Islam had sure left its mark.
Actually, genetically, sub-Saharan Africans are the most human. Their genetic population has the least amount of non- Homo Sapiens DNA. Whites, Asians and Pacific Islanders have much more DNA from other hominids.
Actually not true. While subsaharan Africans don't have Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA, they do have ancestry from another archaic hominid population that has yet to be identified.
In any case, the reason that archaic hominid genes persist is that they have been advantageous. For instance, it's thought that modern Tibetans acquired their altitude adaptation genes from the Denisovans. So arguing about who is more human than whom is kind of pointless.
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2019/03/03/very-ancient-ghosts-in-the-african-genome/
If only there was a political philosophy that could conserve the ideas that are learned from generations of trial and error, so we don't keep repeating them. Not sure what we would call it...
We would call it bigotry, of course.
The claim that anti-sodomy laws were passed to protect the health of the populace is a modern rationalization. It might be believable if not for the fact that societies who passed those laws also criminalized any and all behaviors perceived as homosexual.
AIDS ended the 70's, nothing was the same after.
"I'd actually heard of Rock Hudson being Gay before that, because a Gay guy in our dorm talked about going to "sex parties" at Rock's house. Frankly, i didn't believe it. Which showed how naive I was."
My uncle graduated from Harvard Law School in the 1950s and went right into the Navy as a Navy lawyer. He told my mother at that time that one case he dealt with was the dishonorable discharge of a sailor who had been caught having sex with Rock Hudson.
"Why so hostile Cook?"
My comment wasn't hostile. Just correcting a misconception born of prejudice that anal sex (whether engaged in by homo- or heterosexuals), like oral sex, has been common throughout the ages and in every culture. There's nothing new under the sun, as the saying goes, and there are only so many basic ways to have sex. Humans, finding excitement in novelty, will always explore as many ways as they can think of to play variations on that which they enjoy.
"I'm concerned that Anthropology has been perverted for political causes. "
Anthropology was so obviously the stepchild of European colonialism that it had no choice but to become as PC as it possibly could.
Looks like the press is attempting to change the narrative from the facts of Patient Zero into the rampantly promiscuous gay community to some lone teenager who mysteriously got HIV, with no evidence that can be cross-checked.
Kinda like how Matthew Sheppard was murdered by homophobes and not a meth addicted ex-lover over a drug deal.
"There's nothing new under the sun, as the saying goes, and there are only so many basic ways to have sex. Humans, finding excitement in novelty, will always explore as many ways as they can think of to play variations on that which they enjoy."
Yes and now we know that some of those other ways are more hazardous and maybe shouldn't be promoted as just another fun thing to do with your junk.
"'I'm concerned that Anthropology has been perverted for political causes.'
"Practically every other field has, so why not Anthropology?"
What makes you think every field of study or scientific endeavor hasn't always been used (or suppressed) for political purposes (or, more accurately, perhaps, interpreted/understood in the context of the prevailing worldview of the culture and/or time and the information available)?
That doesn't necessarily negate any particular perspective or conclusions drawn. What are dismissively called "revisionist" theories of (name your discipline of choice) are just the most recent interpretations of the data (influenced by the prevailing worldview and/or culture of the times, as well as new information gained). Whether the updated theories/interpretations are "perversions" of prior sacrosanct "truth" or corrections to prior error has no single certain answer.
"Yes and now we know that some of those other ways are more hazardous and maybe shouldn't be promoted as just another fun thing to do with your junk."
Why not, as long as one takes precautions? Before the age of modern antibiotics, venereal disease, syphilis in particular, caused illness and death among all sex-having populations, not just homo- or heterosexuals. Did that stop people from having sex? No. (It may have contributed to feelings that sex was "dirty.")
It would be unusual for people to be aware of, and name, a disease that doesn't yet exist.
"'I'm concerned that Anthropology has been perverted for political causes.'
The LEFT has perverted EVERY field of study. One of their mantra's is: "Everything is Political".
Its funny how some Center-Right people simply can't accept that. Or they don't believe it. They don't care much about Politics and find it impossible to believe Left-wingers do - a lot. That's why they're useful idiots (Lenin's phrase).
BTW, I was half-listening to some so-called Economist on NPR babbling about "Free Trade" and Trump's tariffs. Basically, we're all going to die in a trade war. LOL. Just another Leftist POSING as an objective Economist.
I'm sure the NPR swallowed all the Bullshit, and now think they're "Wicked smart" on Trump and the Chinese. LOL!
"You know something we don't hear much about anymore is heterosexual AIDS in Africa."
According to data collected in the Demographic and Health Surveys 2009–2017—a programme that collects and disseminates data on health and populations in developing countries—in the past decade HIV prevalence has been up to three times higher among 20–29-year-old women than men in some of the countries with the highest HIV burden in western and central Africa: Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana.
https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/presscentre/featurestories/2019/february/20190225_WCA_women
my first crush was for Peter Vom Lehn, our parents were friends. he did not return the crush.
years later we had lunch in NYC where he was building a career in opera but had a cough he could not shake.
he left his yellow unbreakable comb in my car.
he is #11 on the list of folks who died of AIDS.
i comb my hair every day with that still unbroken comb.
"Are you really this ignorant? Children and teens contracted HIV from blood transfusion, not sex. Most of them were hemophiliacs."
This is true, Gahrie, but the teenager in this article is being written up elsewhere as a neglected LGBT youth (https://www.newsweek.com/robert-rayford-first-hiv-death-america-1423450".
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