Although HIV made its spectacular appearance in the early 80s of the last century, it was years before the origin of this retrovirus could be determined, and in the meantime there was a debate about whether it was a natural disease or rather, a human invention, in the style of Frankenstein, a virus escaped from laboratories where biological weapons were developed.
Today it is known that it is a natural disease, not less deadly, considering that There are about 35 million infected in the world and 2 million more are infected annually.However, one question has persisted: how long does HIV exist, and apparently we already have an answer.
Do you know? How long has HIV been there? You will be horrified
Although AIDS was identified in the 80s, researchers today believe that the disease arose in equatorial Africa, where several strains of this retrovirus affected different species of chimpanzees and cercocebus ( gray mangabey ); happening in two or three occasions to the human beings (the passage of a disease to humans is known as zoonosis).
It is currently believed that the current disease began to develop in countries Africa in the early twentieth century, although the epidemic began several decades later, becoming a pandemic-a global disease-in a few years.
However, this does not answer at all how long it has been HIV, a question that leads beyond, to the origin of the ancestors of this disease.HIV is a retrovirus belonging to the genus of lentivirus , named for being very slow incubation (as we now know) , and these in turn are divided into five groups that attack primates, goats, cats, horses and other mammals , and through genetics it is possible to track ar the age of this genre, which a few years ago a group of researchers data in 12 million years .
It seems a long time, but a new study by researchers at the Academy Czech of Sciences and the University of Maryland (United States), published in Molecular Biology and Evolution , a publication of the University of Oxford, indicates that retroviruses could be even older .These researchers found in a species known as the Malaysian flying lemur ( Galeopterus variegatus ), retrovirus strokes that would trace its history to 60 million years ago , just 5 million years away from the disappearance of dinosaurs.
The flying lemur does not fly, nor is it a lemur, but a genus called demopter , to which very few species belong, but it is a distant cousin of primates, and older, with a history that goes back 75 million years (remember that hominids, the genre to which we belong, does not exceed 7 million years).
Through the genetic analysis of specimens of this species, the researchers determined that that in the DNA there were traces of lentiviruses , present in all colugos, as they are also known, which would indicate that already He was in a common ancestor 60 million years ago.
The answer to the question of how long ago HIV exists has been partially answered, until it is possible to track the lentivirus much more back, because the Malay lemur, the musaranas and the primates had a common ancestor that went extinct 82 million years ago.they hit the planet, and it is likely that they will continue to exist when humans have also become extinct.
Did you imagine that HIV could be so old? Neither do we, and that's why we recommend another article about the oldest known diseases.
Images: budak, NIMR London, microbiologybytes
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