I'm definitely not what you would consider a conspiracy theorist, but having grown up in the same town as Fort Detrick, the home of USAMRIID, the Army's infectious disease nerve center (which was a focal point in the movie Outbreak) I've certainly heard my fair share of scary urban legend - type stories about it.
When I was a kid, I can remember my grandfather telling me how he helped install all of the fencing on the base when it was converted from 'Camp Detrick' to 'Fort Detrick' and how he always mentioned that several people stationed there at the time told him something along the lines of 'If you knew what went on and wwas buried over here, you wouldn't want to live within 50 miles.'
Somewhere around my middle school years, there was talk about how AIDS might have been developed there, and there were also rumors about shipments of HIV went missing and so on. I definitely never ascribed to them, though I have heard some interesting theories over the years concerning why AIDS seemed like it might be artificial.
In the past few days, some very interesting material has emerged about the real nature of the disease. Yesterday, it was announced that researchers have determined that HIV leapt from primates to humans, with the first known case occurring in Cameroon.
"The first human known to be infected with HIV was a man from Kinshasa in the nearby country of Congo who had his blood stored in 1959 as part of a medical study, decades before scientists knew the AIDS virus existed.
Presumably, someone in rural Cameroon was bitten by a chimp or was cut while butchering one and became infected with the ape virus. That person passed it to someone else."
Even more interesting, this article dug up by an industrious Digg.com user:
"...evidence that a St. Louis teen-ager died of AIDS in 1969 suggests that the AIDS virus may have been introduced into the United States several times before touching off the current epidemic, according to experts in disease transmission.
Until now, many experts have assumed that the virus that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome first appeared in the country sometime in the mid-1970's. Evidence indicates to many experts that the disease originated before then in Africa, although this has not been proved.
The patient, identified only as Robert R., died in 1969 of an illness that baffled his doctors at Washington University in St. Louis. They published a paper in 1984 suggesting that, with hindsight, his symptoms resembled those of AIDS. About two months ago, molecular biologists at Tulane University in New Orleans examined stored specimens of Robert R.'s tissues for signs of the AIDS virus and found that the 15-year-old was apparently infected with it.
An autopsy showed that the Robert R. had Kaposi's sarcoma, a skin cancer that is almost a hallmark of AIDS infections in gay men. The youth had just one outward sign of the cancer, a tiny purple spot on his thigh, Dr. Drake said. But when Dr. Drake performed an autopsy, he found other Kaposi sarcoma lesions throughout the soft tissues of the youth's body."
Although it's not conclusive, it definitely seems to put this conspiracy theory to rest.
Source: AP/Myway
More: New York Times
Technorati Tags: AIDS, HIV, Science, Medicine, Africa, United States, Detrick, Infection, Research, Cameroon, SIV, Medicine, USAMRIID
