Aids: Origin of pandemic 'was 1920s Kinshasa'
By James Gallagher
Health editor, BBC News website
3 October 2014 From the section Health
Kinshasa, pictured in 1955, was at the centre of the
pandemic, scientists say
The origin of the Aids pandemic has been traced to the
1920s in the city of Kinshasa, in what is now the
Democratic Republic of Congo, scientists say.
An international team of scientists say a "perfect storm"
of population growth, sex and railways allowed HIV to
spread.
A feat of viral archaeology was used to find the pandemic's
origin, the team report in the journal Science.
They used archived samples of HIV's genetic code to trace
its source, with evidence pointing to 1920s Kinshasa.
Their report says a roaring sex trade, rapid population
growth and unsterilised needles used in health clinics
probably spread the virus.
Meanwhile Belgium-backed railways had one million people
flowing through the city each year, taking the virus to
neighbouring regions.
Experts said it was a fascinating insight into the start of
the pandemic.
HIV came to global attention in the 1980s and has infected
nearly 75 million people.
It has a much longer history in Africa, but where the
pandemic started has remained the source of considerable
debate.
Family affair
A team at the University of Oxford and the University of
Leuven, in Belgium, tried to reconstruct HIV's "family
tree" and find out where its oldest ancestors came from.
The research group analysed mutations in HIV's genetic
code.
"You can see the footprints of history in today's genomes,
it has left a record, a mutation mark in the HIV genome
that can't be eradicated," Prof Oliver Pybus from the
University of Oxford told the BBC.
By reading those mutational marks, the research team
rebuilt the family tree and traced its roots.
HIV is a mutated version of a chimpanzee virus, known as
simian immunodeficiency virus, which probably made the
species-jump through contact with infected blood while
handling bush meat.
The virus made the jump on multiple occasions. One event
led to HIV-1 subgroup O which affects tens of thousands in
Cameroon.
Yet only one cross-species jump, HIV-1 subgroup M, went
on to infect millions of people across every country in the
world.
The answer to why this happened lies in the era of black
and white film and the tail-end of the European empires.
In the 1920s, Kinshasa (called Leopoldville until 1966) was
part of the Belgian Congo.
Prof Oliver Pybus said: "It was a very large and very rapidly
growing area and colonial medical records show there was a
high incidence of various sexually transmitted diseases."
Sex and railways
Large numbers of male labourers were drawn to the city,
distorting the gender balance until men outnumbered
women two to one, eventually leading to a roaring sex
trade.
Prof Pybus added: "There are two aspects of
infrastructure that could have helped.
"Public health campaigns to treat people for various
infectious diseases with injections seem a plausible route
[for spreading the virus].
"The second really interesting aspect is the transport
networks that enabled people to move round a huge
country."
Around one million people were using Kinshasa's railways by
the end of the 1940s.
The virus spread, with neighbouring Brazzaville and the
mining province, Katanga, rapidly hit.
Those "perfect storm" conditions lasted just a few decades
in Kinshasa, but by the time they ended the virus was
already starting to spread around the world.
The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) attacks the
immune system
Prof Jonathan Ball, from the University of Nottingham,
told the BBC: "It's a fascinating insight into the early
phases of the HIV-1 pandemic.
"It's the usual suspects that are most likely to have helped
the virus get a foothold in humans - travel, population
increases and human practices such as unsafe healthcare
interventions and prostitution.
"Perhaps the most contentious suggestion is that the
spread of the M-group viruses had more to do with the
conditions being right than it had to do with these viruses
being better adapted for transmission and growth in
humans. I'm sure this suggestion will prompt interesting
and lively debate within the field."
Dr Andrew Freedman, a reader in infectious diseases at
Cardiff University, said: "It does seem an interesting
study demonstrating very elegantly how HIV spread in the
Congo region long before the Aids epidemic was recognised
in the early 80s.
"It was already known that HIV in humans arose by cross
species transmission from chimpanzees in that region of
Africa, but this study maps in great detail the spread of
the virus from Kinshasa, it was fascinating to read."
Source: http://m.bbc.com/news/health-29442642

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Liars

And where did they pull that from

Saw this post on fb when Guardian UK posted this on fb earlier today. I was fascinated.

Andrew Lally
In July 1969, the Biological Warfare Division of the Dept. of Defense requested a House Appropriations hearing for funding from the US Senate for 8€ million to develop synthetic biological agents or bio-warfare weapons.

US Army bio-warfare expert Dr. Donald MacArthur told the Senate: “Within the next 5 to 10 years, it would probably be possible to make a new infective micro-organism [that] ... might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes [depended upon] to maintain our relative freedom from infectious diseases” – in other words, a virus that would kill the immune system.

On December 10, 1974, Henry Kissinger argued in National Security Memorandum 200, “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security & Overseas Interests”, that “Depopulation should be the highest priority of US foreign policy towards the Third World”. He did not say how depopulation was to be achieved ...

In 1986, Dr. Robert Strecker alleged that the US military distributed its HIV bio-weapon by means of the World Health Organisation´s smallpox vaccination programme, under which tens of millions of Africans were vaccinated by injection during the late 1970s. HIV was then introduced into the US population via United States Public Health Service Hepatitis B vaccinations on gay and bisexual men, carried out between 1978 and 1981 in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis, Denver and Chicago. Those cities subsequently developed the US´ highest AIDS rates.

Of those who received the hepatitis B vaccination in New York in 1978, more than half were diagnosed with AIDS by 1984.

Time magazine denounced Strecker´s theory, but it has since been supported by various doctors, including author, Dr. Alan Cantwell, AND Dr. Robert Gallo, who is credited with having been the first to isolate HIV, at Fort Detrick in 1984 (Fort Detrick being home to the National Cancer Institute and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research).

Gallo commented in 1987 that the smallpox-HIV link was “interesting and important”, adding that “live vaccines such as that used for smallpox can activate a dormant infection such as HIV”.

Gallo may have actually discovered HIV back in the early 1970s, but ... his work was suppressed. [This is] echoed by Richie and Rosalind Chirimuuta in AIDS, Africa and Racism ... They also note the similarity between HIV and the sheep virus, Visna, hinting at some lab-induced mutation.

In his 1986 pamphlet, AIDS: USA Home-made Evil, Jacabo Segal, biology professor at Humboldt University in East Berlin, suggested that HIV was created at Fort Detrick in 1977, when the sheep virus, Visna, was spliced together with HIV-1. The resulting concoction was then tested on “volunteer” prisoners in exchange for early release. HIV then spread to the population through gays. Fort Detrick promptly denied Segal´s theory, while KGB defector, Vasili Mitrokhin, subsequently denounced it as a KGB disinformation programme.
Edited · Like· 25 · Reply · 8 hours ago
17 replies

This is the greatest lie of the century, except they're trying to tell us that the lab where they created the disease is in Kinshasa, whatever. #theyneedtostopblamingafrica