Trans-Species Jump

ornithosis: HIV: Trans-Species Jump

Why, when in the past viruses like the ones of ornithosis carried out the trans-species jump from the animal reserve to man, wasn’t there an epidemic as permanent and widespread as AIDS?

Even though ornithosis can pass from man to man, only when the latter is very ill, it can scatter a sufficient quantity of viruses; this doesn’t happen when it can still live together with the general community[1].

As to HIV we know that the majority of contagions occurs when a seropositive is apparently healthy and this condition lasts a long time.

An epidemic that, instead, causes a sudden and high in percentage mortality, brings about, in man, a panic reaction such as to urge him to isolate the disease immediately. This is as much more possible as more limited the community where the first cases occur is.

HIV_Epidem

It’s obvious also for HIVs to have started with isolated cases in small communities but, the chronic progress of the infection caused the AIDS risk to be recognized only when the virus had widely spread all over the world. In this sense AIDS viruses represent, from an evolutive point of view, an undoubted progress as for survival and affirmation.

With regards all this the conclusion Burnt, a biologist, got to fifty years ago is amazing: while speaking about a hypothetical virus of animal origin which might cause new human contageous diseases, he asserted that once passed to man “the virus will be able to survive endlessly if human circumstances of time and place, from the beginning, see to a wide enough dissemination of it”.

At the same way he stated that ” because of the wide animal reserve of viruses which can cause diseases to men, it’s natural to think that in the future many more viruses will be probable to emerge and carry out the trans-species jump.

Practically Burnt had predicted HIVs and AIDS[2] should appear. This is actually what is happening in the last few years and we will see it in detail in the chapter of emerging viruses.

Just as Burnt had told about AIDS spreading those circumstances of time and place favourable to a wide dissemination of the virus have turned out.

Overpopulation, rapid transfers and prostitution have found the opportunity to act in close synergy along the highway connecting Kinshasa (Zaire) and Monbasa(Kenya)[3].

Prostitution in africa

The invasion of ecological niches and the massive use of monkeys for scientific researches haven’t certainly been effected only by the Africans so favouring the trans-species jump.

Experiments on monkeys

Sexual promiscuity and the consequent viral traffic are a world heritage; if anything, some nations setting, somehow, an example exist, but after some time all the others try to catch up in what is bad and good.

Sexual promiscuity

Some differences in sexual habits and not explain, instead, the diversity of risk factors and the composition of seropositive groups in the various states. So in Africa, where female prostitution prevails, the number of seropositive women is very high and contagion occurs above all through heterosexual way.

HIV: Trans-Species Jump

In North America sexual promiscuity mostly concerns gay communities and homosexuality has been, till now, the most important risk factor together with drug addiction for AIDS spreading. Yet in the last few years heterosexuals and bisexuals have managed not to leave gays and drug addicts the leadership of seropositivity.

gay promiscuity

Now heterosexual intercourses have become an important source of contagion even if, at present, prevalently, in man-woman direction (it’s easier for a seropositive man to infect a woman than vice versa).

HIV did even more: since it was afraid of being accused of discrimination by female gay movements, it could have itself passed from woman to woman through vaginal secretions during a sexual oro-genital intercourse.

Medicine has done nothing less in helping the virus to be spread. In fact from one side there have been about six thousand publications a year about HIV and AIDS, from the other the use of infected blood for transfusions has contributed a lot towards HIV spreading.

[1] Mac Farlane Burnet F. Virus as organism. Pag.69-70 Harvard University Press 1950.

[2] Mac Farlane Burnet Op.cit. 124-7

[3] Conner S, Kingmn S. The search for the virus Penguin London1988