ORIGINS OF HIV: THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF UNORTHODOX CONSPIRACY THEORIES- BY MARISEN MWALE

ORIGINS OF HIV:

THE MAKING AND UNMAKING

OF

UNORTHODOX CONSPIRACY THEORIES

The Human Immunodeficiency Virus [virus that causes AIDS] belongs to the large family of RNA viruses. The exact origins of HIV will never be completely elicited. There are however certain facts that have led to more or less general agreement among scientists as to the source of this epidemic. It is plausible to conclude that HIV is a pathogen new to the human race, the first documented cases of what is now known to have been HIV-1 infection in humans occurring in Central Africa in 1959. According to Robert Gallo and other theorists in what has come to be known as the Green Monkey Theory HIV infection of humans probably resulted from a non-pathogenic, sub-human primate retrovirus, which made a species jump from African monkeys and chimpanzees to humans. There is widespread evidence that many old world primates in sub-Saharan Africa, e.g., chimpanzees, mandrills, sooty mangabeys and African green monkeys, have been infected with retroviruses similar to HIV for thousands of years, although they are non-pathogenic and do not cause disease in these animals. The viruses are referred to as simian immunodeficiency viruses [SIV]. They have the same complex genomic structure as HIV, share 40-50% homology [genomic similarity] with HIV and infect T-lymphocytes through the CD4+ cell-surface receptor, just as HIV does.

It is probable that these retroviruses are the progenitor viruses from which HIV either mutated or recombined into the human population. Humans may have been exposed to these viruses as a result of killing and butchering monkeys. In doing so, blood from an SIV-infected non-human primate could have infected human through non-intact skin on the hands. Once SIV had gained entry to the human body, it found it could thrive in what was, after all, simply a closely related primate species. The concept of cross-species transmission, i.e., a zoonosis, refers to any disease or infection that may be transmitted between animals and humans under natural conditions. Several other infectious diseases of humans have a zoonotic origin, e.g., tuberculosis, rabies, brucellosis, Lassa fever and various tropical hemorrhagic fevers. The species leap may have occurred, from time to time, for many hundreds of years. However, HIV infection [and subsequent disease] remained episodic. Because of the rural [village] lifestyle, short life span and restriction of the number of different sexual partners in the past, the infection was not widely transmitted to other humans and remained localized to the village. Several factors conspired to change this episodic infection, first to an epidemic and then to a pandemic infection, including; the migration of rural populations into cities, changes in sexual behavior leading to more frequent changes in sexual partners, improved road, rail as well as air travel routes and international travel. In addition, increasing reliance on non-barrier forms of contraception, i.e., ‘the pill’, and injecting drug use also hastened the spread of HIV infection.

There is no evidence to support the theory painstakingly elaborated by journalist Edward Hooper that oral polio vaccines used in Africa during the 1960s and 1970s had been accidentally contaminated during manufacture with the chimpanzee strain of SIV and other simian tissues used as culture medium and may have contributed to the rapid spread of human HIV infection in Africa. There is also no evidence for other conspiracy theories as that HIV was accidentally cultured as part of other clinical research in other words ‘chance’ occurrence possibly in cancer research. There is neither evidence that HIV was deliberately cultured as a biological warfare experimental virus at the US Army’s bio-warfare department at Ft Detrick, Maryland or by the German biological warfare all the way back to the Nazi dominance or in the Russian secret service’s deliberate use of destructive viruses.

Other bizarre theories for the origins of HIV/AIDS as hypothesized by Edward Hooper allude to ex caelo origins [from the skies]. The tail of the comet theory elucidates that the viral material responsible for AIDS was carried in the tail gases of a comet passing close to the earth and that this material was deposited, subsequently infecting nearby people. Another such orthodox based theory stipulates that God’s wrath is responsible for the plague due to the sins of this generation. Wherever the virus emanated from, the bottom-line however remains that AIDS is here with us and we need to delve into mechanisms of not only containing the pandemic but researching a cure and possibly a vaccine all of which still remain a toll order.

BY MARISEN MWALE: FELLOW/MACRO