CURRENT EVENTS Essay Example For Students

CURRENT EVENTS: Essay Hiv HIVS ROOTS TRACED TO 1930SummaryScientists 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 wasnt 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, the introduction of HIV in chimpanzees occurred well before the polio vaccine.