AIDs which results from successively compromising of the human immune defence system by HIV is probably one of the biggest pandemics recorded in human history. In some areas in Africa up to 50 % of the adult population is seropositive. The former republics of the Soviet Union represent one of the fastest growing regions for HIV infected persons with 1-5 % of the adult population infected (
Wikipedia).
Since the emergence of HIV in the 1980s, its origin has been highly contested; some saying the
virus jumped from monkeys to humans; some saying it was acquired via mass production and subsequent human administration of the oral polio vaccine in the kidneys of Chimpanzees. The first record of an HIV positive human was a bantu man in Congo in Kinshasha (former Zaire) from whose plasma HIV was detected from a sample collected in 1959. HIV was found in tissue samples from a 15 year old Africa-American teenager who died in St. Louis in 1969. From the plasma of a Norwegian sailor who died around 1976 HIV was found (Wikipedia).
In the May 25th online issue of the prestigious science magazine, Keele and others by collecting and analyzing over 1,300 droppings from wild
apes reported the detection of SIVcpz (ancestor of HIV-1) antibodies and nucleic acids in fecal samples from wild-living apes in a remote forest region of southern Cameroon where prevalence rates in some communities reached 29 to 35%. Their research put to rest the question of where the HIV-1 virus came from and its present reserviour. However, the puzzle remains as to how the simain virus jumped from the chimpanzee, mutated and then adapted to its human host as HIV-1. Some speculate that it might have been through butchering and eating of an infected
Chimp or that a human was bitten by an infected chimp. However there is no
evidence supporting these hypotheses since it is grounded on speculative evidence. Note worthy is the mysterious fact that even though infected by SIVcpz, the chimps fail to develop AIDS.
http://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/HIV . http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1126531 . Listen to this commentary on how colonial practices might have encouraged the spread of HIV. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5450391 .
More abstracts about the Origin of HIV