ORIGINALITY OF HIV

ORINALITY OF HIV/AIDS
Scientific have traced the origin of HIV back to chimpanzees and Simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) an HIV-like virus that attacks the immune of monkeys and apes. SIVcpz (a strain of chimpanzees SIV) likely jumped to humans when hunters in Africa ate infected chimps or the chimps’ infected blood got into the wounds of the hunters. Normally, the hunter’s body would have fought off SIV, but a few occasion the virus adapted itself within its new human host and became HIV-1. There are four main groups of HIV strains that is M, N, O and P(The most studied strain in HIV is HIV-1 Group M, which is the strain that has spread throughout the world and responsible for the vast majority of HIV infection today.)
Researchers believe the first transmission of SIV to HIV occurred in 1920 in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 1960s, HIV spread from Africa to Haiti (the ‘B’ subtype of HIV-1 of strain M had made its way. At this time, many Haitian professionals who were working in the Colonial Democratic Republic of Congo during the 1960s returned to Haiti. They were initially blamed for being responsible for the HIV epidemic and suffered severe racism, stigma and discrimination as a result) and Caribbean to New York City around 1970 and then to San Francisco later.
In September of 1982 the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States, used the AIDs to describe the disease for the first year.AID causes were also reported in a number of European countries. In 1983, scientists discovered the virus that causes AIDs. The virus was at first named HTLV-III/ LAV (human T-cells lymphotropic virus-type III/lymphadenopathy associated virus) by an international scientific committee. In 1984 researches finally identified the cause of AIDs – the HIV virus. In 1999, an international team of researchers reported that they had discovered the origins of HIV -1 the predominant stain 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.
Esther Wanjiru

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