Kinshasa

My roommate linked to and discussed an article about the origins of HIV/AIDS. The article talks about how a version of HIV can be traced back to the 1920s in the area then known as Kinshasa, which is now part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The area was a hub of railways and, as usually follows, the sex trade. It was also an area where colonization was in full force.

This is interesting to me for several reasons. First of all,  this pushes the origins of HIV back farther than we thought. Before this, we were thinking the 1950s. This gives it 30 years more to circulate. When we believed HIV was something that just suddenly showed up in the 1980s, it seemed so fast and overwhelming. The fact that it has a slower spiral into epidemic levels gives the spread of the virus a whole new perspective. It also lends itself to more questions. Why did it suddenly go from something that spread at a slow rate to something that was killing vast numbers of people off quite quickly? Was this just a further advancement in the mutation of the virus or something else?

It also has a link (perhaps relevant, perhaps not) with further advancement in travel. All conspiracies aside, we know for a fact that when people have no immunity to a disease, they are more susceptible to it. The HIV virus is very adaptable as well. It adapts faster than we do, finding the best mode for its own survival. Travel and therefore greater chances of exposure are always going to play into something like this.

And I do want to leave all conspiracy theories aside because one of the things I noticed from reading the comments to this article is that a lot of people indulge in a great deal of blame-assigning when it comes to HIV. Some people blame homosexuality. Some people blame bisexuals. Some people blame white people trying to kill off 'undesirables.' Some people blame Africa. Some people blame corporations. Sadly, past that, the blame just gets more and more strange.

There are a lot of problems with this kind of blaming, but I think the biggest one is that it becomes this just horrible mental noise that drowns out any scientific or rational discourse about HIV. It serves no purpose other than to anger one group or the other. It also usually makes the conspiracy theorist look like an idiot.

As to how knowing the origins of the virus may assist in curing it, I'm not sure. It may not actually affect HIV one way or the other. However, it may be able to help us chart and estimate the way other viruses spread, especially if they move from something slow and steady into something alarmingly fast.