Haitians brought AIDS to America

CHICAGO: The strain of HIV that touched off the US AIDS epidemic and fueled the global scourge of the disease came to the continent from Africa via Haiti, according to a study released on Monday.

"Haiti was the stepping stone the virus took when it left central Africa and started its sweep around the world," said Michael Worobey, an assistant professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and senior author of the paper.

The deadly virus probably arrived on US shores in about 1969, more than a decade before the full-blown US AIDS crisis of the 1980s, and may have been carried there by a single Haitian immigrant, according to the study.

"Once the virus got to the US, then it just moved explosively around the world," Worobey said.

The finding confirms longstanding suspicions among some scientists that the pathogen was imported from Haiti - the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, with a long history of migration to the US.

The timing suggests that it was more likely to have been a Haitian immigrant or immigrants rather than US sex tourists returning from Haiti, since it did not become a destination for them until the 1970s, Worobey said.

The research also pegs the beginning of the US AIDS epidemic to the late 1960s rather than the mid 1970s as was previously assumed, and shows that the disaster was brewing for a full 12 years before US public health authorities realized they had an epidemic on their hands.

The strain of the virus that touched off the US epidemic subsequently spread to Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan. It was not clear previously how the virus got to the United States from central Africa, where it first surfaced in humans around 1930 after jumping species from chimpanzee to man.

Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com