ANTHROP 2U03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Common Chimpanzee, Microorganism, The White Plague
6 Dec 2017
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1981: reports of rare opportunistic infections e. g. pneumonia caused by pneumocystis carinii in the gay communities of large us cities. Individuals were in fact suffering from a severe immunodeficiency. (cid:858) oo(cid:374)(cid:859) realized that aid (cid:449)as also prese(cid:374)t i(cid:374) i(cid:374)je(cid:272)ti(cid:374)g drug users a(cid:374)d he(cid:373)ophilia(cid:272)s. it was therefore caused by the transmission of an infectious agent, like a virus. 1983: the human immunodeficiency virus, hiv-1, was isolated. A few years later a second related virus, hiv-2, was discovered in west africa. First identified in us gay males in the early 1980s, severe immunosuppression. Other rare opportunistic infections, horrendous suffering and death. Hiv is from the lentivirus group of retroviruses (i. e. has both rna and dna stages), the genome is an rna based genome. Lentiviruses have been characterized from a variety of mammals including primates (siv) Virus genomes are very small compared to bacterial genomes.
