New strain of HIV

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8175379.stm

Quit eating monkeys!

Technician said:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8175379.stm

Quit fucking monkeys!

fixed

Oh Christ, this is just what the world needs right now...

The virus probably originally jumped into humans after people came into contact with infected bush meat.

...huhuh....huhuuh, he said "bush meat".. huhuhhuh! huhuhuh!
nnheh, Ma'am, I'm gonna need to check your bush meat, nheh, heh..


Joking aside, Viruses scare the piss out of me. for not being "technically" alive, they sure do play their part as efficient killing machines.

Just wait til some lab cooks up AIDS Flu.

Retroviruses aren't very good at being airborne. If I recall correctly, it is damn near impossible. RNA is extremely delicate and will fall apart in milliseconds. DNA is not so delicate and can survive, in remnants, for centuries. However ,HIV depends on RNA and transcriptase; which is why it's not like the flu at all.

Csonicgo said:

Retroviruses aren't very good at being airborne. If I recall correctly, it is damn near impossible. RNA is extremely delicate and will fall apart in milliseconds. DNA is not so delicate and can survive, in remnants, for centuries. However ,HIV depends on RNA and transcriptase; which is why it's not like the flu at all.

As with all things, any such generalization is dangerous and misguided. A large number of viruses are RNA-based, not just retroviruses, and many of them can become airborne.

Ebola is an example, as an RNA virus. It is normally transmitted by body fluids, but the strain involved in the Reston incident mutated into an airborne variety which crystallized in the lungs and was expelled in violent bloody coughing fits.

Fortunately for humanity, the Reston strain's mutation also made it only capable of killing monkeys. In humans it only caused a frightening proto-Ebola "flu," and then would rapidly die out. If it had back-mutated, or mutated again in response to a new host, the results would have been catastrophic. Especially considering the cleanup crew managed to get several of its members infected and did not follow an appreciable quarantine policy until it would have already been far too late.

Doom Marine said:

fixed

AIDS came from people eating bush meat, which is a terrible thing for many reasons.

I'd feel bad eating a fellow haplorrhini. It's not immoral mind you.

What's this about GRIDS?

Scuse me?

Technician said:

Scuse me?

Gay plague

Danarchy said:

AIDS came from people eating bush meat, which is a terrible thing for many reasons.

I was at a conference on AIDS a few months ago and the opinion of all the experts who expressed one was that it wasn't caused by eating the bushmeat, but it was probably caused by the bushmeat and associated trades. The most likely method of transmission is scratches and bites from either animals that have been captured or from young animals that have been orphaned by the bushmeat trade and subsequently adopted by people (which is in itself a pretty big thing apparently).

Enjay said:

I was at a conference on AIDS a few months ago and the opinion of all the experts who expressed one was that it wasn't caused by eating the bushmeat, but it was probably caused by the bushmeat and associated trades. The most likely method of transmission is scratches and bites from either animals that have been captured or from young animals that have been orphaned by the bushmeat trade and subsequently adopted by people (which is in itself a pretty big thing apparently).

Well, I didn't mean eating the bushmeat directly as the cause, but I figured it had something to do with the butchering process. That's interesting, though.

Mr. Chris said:

Isn't it illegal to do these sorts of things?

Probably falls within the same legal gray area as voluntary cannibalism, amputations, etc. if between consenting adults. Ironically, voluntarily accepting and not fighting against a disease is quite prevalent among certain religions, especially extreme sects of Christianity ("embracing pain", "accepting God's will" and all that), if it wasn't for the fact that the acts involved to actually catch the disease are considered immoral.

I once read an article about the mentality of people in the most affected sub-saharan African countries vs the virus, which was mostly a sad mixture of passive acceptance of something inevitable, indifference and fatalism.

Otherwise (willingly spreading it to unaware/unwilling subjects) it falls into the same category as the deeds of medieval plague-spreaders.

Reading some of the SA article, there seemed to be one guy who intentionally exposed a man or two to HIV infected body wastes (The biker guy) so that could count.