Researchers from the University of Arizona in Tuscon announced that the most pervasive global strain of HIV began spreading among humans between 1884 and 1924. This finding suggests that growing urbanization in colonial Africa was the catalyst for the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Michael Worobey, an assistant ecology and evolutionary biology professor at Arizona, led the research, which studied a number of HIV-1 (the strain found in most cases outside of Africa) genetic sequences to determine the time periods when the virus genetically diverged from its predecessors. These findings, published in the current issue of Nature, were mapped out in the form of a family tree whose roots date back to the beginning of the 20th century…
The scientists recovered the 48-year-old HIV gene fragments from a wax-embedded lymph node tissue biopsy from a woman in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The oldest known HIV-1 group M genetic sequence comes from a 1959 blood sample given by a Kinshasa man. A comparison between the same genetic regions of the 1959 and 1960 viruses provided additional evidence that their common ancestor existed around 1900.
