AIDS :: AIDS Essays

Scientists have concluded, based on mathematical research, that the virus that lead to the epidemic of AIDS can be traced all the way back to 1930, somewhere around Central Africa. Bette Korber, of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, presented this conclusion at the Conference of Retroviruses. The notion that HIV was introduced in contaminated oral polio vaccines in Africa between the years of 1957 and 1961 has been often debated and challenged. The results presented by Korber, not only refute the before mentioned allegations, but also move us toward finding out where the virus really came from and in which direction it is heading in the future. The first sample discovered in 1959 comes from a man in Congo, who died as a member of the M class of HIV, the type that most people are infected with today. However old the virus was, it was evident that it wasn’t the first of its kind. The reason that the virus was ever connected to polio is because in the same year of 1959, the introduction of oral polio vaccines, supposedly tested on chimpanzees, came to the continent of Africa. However in reality, states Stanley Plotkin of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, â€Å"the introduction of HIV in chimpanzees occurred well before the polio vaccine.† The machine used in the process of determination is the Los Alamos Nirvana Machine, which is capable of making one trillion calculations per second. After plugging in dates, formulas and locations, the Nirvana located the origin of the HIV virus as being 1930, however the range of error shows that it could have been anywhere from 1915 to 1942. The Nirvana was also able to determine that the virus appeared in the Caribbean Islands such as Haiti, in the 1960’s, while it came to America more than ten years later. It is quite definite that the virus came from chimpanzees in the area around Gabon, Cameroon, and the Central African rainforest. It most probably passed onto the hunters while they were butchering the animals. After that, the virus has taken on six different strands, and is spread in humans mostly through sexual intercourse. Issue The matter being discussed here is the AIDS epidemic. AIDS and the HIV virus are very real issues in the world and especially in America. Whether it is the needle of the syringe of a junkie, a blood transfusion or the exchange of bodily fluids, people are getting infected and dying every day with this disease, and there is no remedy.