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Science
Friday > Archives
> 1998
> February
> February 6, 1998:
Hour One:
| A team of AIDS researchers announced this week that they have located the oldest known sample of HIV, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. Dr. David Ho, et.al, report in this week's Nature
that they have discovered fragments of the virus in a sample of blood plasma taken in 1959 from a Bantu tribesman who lived in Leopoldville, Belgian Congo (now Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo). The fragments they found were very small, and not in good condition. However, they were able to make enough copies of four fragments of genetic material to study the exact type of virus that they had found. | 
New findings have traced the oldest
known sample of HIV to Kinshasa,
Democratic Republic of Congo.
(click for detail view) | HIV mutates very easily - one of the reasons that developing a treatment for HIV infection has been so difficult. Over the years, the virus has developed ten different major subtypes, labelled A-J. The sample taken in 1959, named "ZR59," appears similar to both types B and D - and, the authors say, may be close to the ancestor of both types of the virus. Their work, they say, may show that all types of HIV may have evolved from just one human infection in Africa not long before 1959 - perhaps in the 1940s or early 1950s.
Other AIDS researchers meeting in Chicago this week announced that U.S. deaths due to the AIDS virus have dropped by nearly half during the first six months of 1997. They believe that the decline is largely due to the success of the so-called AIDS cocktails - potent mixtures of medicines, including protease inhibitors, that attack the virus at different stages of its reproductive cycle. The drug combinations can reduce the level of virus in the blood to near undetectable levels - but must be taken religiously to keep tiny reservoirs of virus hidden in the body at bay.
On this hour of Science Friday, we'll take a look at some of the new research going on in the AIDS field, and discuss the topic with Dr. Luc Montaignier, a co-discoverer of the HIV virus.
Guests:
Luc Montagnier
President, World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention
Director, Bernard and Gloria Salick Center for Molecular and Cellular Biology
Queens College
Flushing, NY
David Senechek
Author, "Placing AIDS and HIV in Remission"
AIDS Clinician
Associate Clinical Professor
University of California at San Francisco
San Francisco, CA
Arno Motulsky
Professor of Medicine and Genetics
University of Washington
Seattle, WA
Books/Articles Discussed:
Related Links:
The AIDS
Education Global Information System
National Institutes of
Health Office of AIDS Research
UNAIDS
The World Health Organization
The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention AIDS office
Development
of Vaccines to Infectious Diseases
The AIDS Clinical Trials Information
Service
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