>But Michael Worobey, head of the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, who was also not involved in the recent study, is more sanguine. Worobey says it is not a surprise that there are a diverse number of HIV strains in Central Africa, which is where the disease originated. Identifying a new one does not add much to the knowledge of HIV, he says.
> “It’s actually misleading to describe genetic diversity from the [Democratic Republic of the] Congo as a new subtype,” Worobey says, “because the only useful meaning of the term ‘subtype’” would come from identification of a lineage of the virus that has spread significantly beyond Central Africa. Guidelines for classifying new strains of HIV were established in 2000. The recently discovered subtype belongs to the most common form of HIV, group M, which accounts for more than 90 percent of all HIV cases, Rodgers says.
The amount of press that this has gotten, seems to me like a submarine marketing job by Abbott.
Indeed, and HIV is a “natural reservoir” disease that will continue to generate new strains even if we managed to eradicate it from the human population. The simian variant is just too compatible with us to ever really go away.
If we eradicate it in humans and also people stop eating bushmeat (or including chimpanzees or whatever in that category) then it seems to me like it would be unlikely to make the jump back to humans.
This actually raises an interesting question about potential diseases lurking in food sources. We now have 20/20 hindsight that eating an ape caused this and is therefore a bad idea. They obviously didn't know that when they chose to eat apes. There could be other such food sources that we don't know to be problematic yet. I am reminded of prions and mad cow, kind of a similar story.
Much like how they found the bushmeat apes as a source and with madcow prions, when a whole bunch of people are getting sick it's usually pretty easy to use statistics to determine a common food or infection source.
The implications of food on longer term stuff like cancer will always be a hard thing to nail down but for serious diseases like this I don't think its currently a huge barrier.
I think the long incubation times of some of these is a counterexample.
Someone eats a monkey in rural Cameroon or Congo, and 10 years later they and their sexual partners have their immune system collapse. Will they know the connection?
Some sources say that happened circa 1910. It wasn't identified until the 80s. In the meantime there were some bunk theories tied to homosexuality, drug use, or poverty as the root cause.
I have heard that prion diseases can have even longer periods before they surface after exposure.
They gave it a name, AIDS, in 1982. In my read of your comment, the claim is they should have, through statistics, been able to draw it back to the food source contamination that is now believed to have been a problem about 70 years prior.
In other words, it can take a long time to notice the correlation. I don't think it's much of a stretch to guess that there could be other such correlations, present and future, that have not been discovered or will take some time to discover.
> pretty easy to use statistics to determine a common food or infection source.
It's getting harder. Privacy protections mean this type of analysis across hundreds of millions of records isn't really possible anymore. Without hundreds of millions of records, identifying "people who drank milk from Mr Smiths farm in 1969 were 200% more likely to get parkinsons 45 years later" couldn't be done.
Yet if Mr Smiths farm had cows with some as-yet unidentified prion disease, this is the only way we'd find it.
As soon as you stick the data through an algorithm without getting permission from everyone in the dataset, you're getting put in prison for GDPR violations. Have fun getting consent from 100M people with only their postal address from 50 years ago.
Being the government means never having to say you’re sorry.
(1) Public Health Exemption Legislation
(2) Use the NSA/GCHQ to get the data, run the analysis and once you know the answer do parallel construction with a much smaller, legally available dataset.
You are exaggregating. The current reality demonstrates that
1) nobody goes to jail
2) the corporation ignoring privacy rights gets a fine
3) everyone moves on
Prions do lead to certain degenerative brain diseases. Alzheimer's is caused by different factors, though. Perhaps you're thinking of beta amyloid tangles, which are a different matter.
Would it be possible to eradicate it from the simian population as well since they are so similar?
I assume it would highly depend on how it is eradicated in humans, but the difficulty in finding and treating them would be balanced by what is I imagine a much lower population.
> “It’s actually misleading to describe genetic diversity from the [Democratic Republic of the] Congo as a new subtype,” Worobey says, “because the only useful meaning of the term ‘subtype’” would come from identification of a lineage of the virus that has spread significantly beyond Central Africa. Guidelines for classifying new strains of HIV were established in 2000. The recently discovered subtype belongs to the most common form of HIV, group M, which accounts for more than 90 percent of all HIV cases, Rodgers says.
The amount of press that this has gotten, seems to me like a submarine marketing job by Abbott.