Immigrants Brought HIV To America Via Haiti As Determined By Genetic Analysis Of Lineages Of The Virus

"Analysis clarifies route of AIDS
The virus from Africa reached the U.S. by way of Haiti, a genetic study shows.
By Jia-Rui Chong, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 30, 2007
A genetic analysis of 25-year-old blood samples has outlined a new map of the AIDS virus' journey out of Africa, showing that today's most widespread subtype first emerged in Haiti in the 1960s and arrived in the United States a few years later.

The analysis fills in a gap in the history of the virus, whose migration has been known in only sketchy form from its origin in Africa in the 1930s to its first detection in Los Angeles in 1981.

Dr. Michael Gottlieb, an assistant clinical professor of medicine at UCLA and one of the discoverers of acquired immune deficiency syndrome, said the analysis placed the virus in the United States nearly a decade earlier than previously believed.

"It's pretty clear evidence for Haiti as a steppingstone," he said. "The suggestion that the infection was further below our radar than I'd previously suspected is kind of unnerving."

The analysis, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focused on a variety of HIV known as subtype B, the most prevalent form in most countries outside of Africa.

Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona and senior author of the study, analyzed five blood samples collected in 1982 and 1983 from Haitian AIDS patients in Miami.

The samples were held in frozen storage by the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Worobey and his colleagues looked at two viral genes and compared their sequences with viruses from around the world.

As a baseline, they used virus samples from Central Africa that are considered some of the earliest forms of the human immunodeficiency virus .

Because viruses constantly mutate, researchers could construct a rough timeline of development by measuring how much the genes in more recent samples had drifted away from their ancestral forms.

The team found that the Haitian samples were genetically the most closely related to the African virus, indicating that they were among the earliest to branch off.

Statistically, researchers found a 99.7% certainty that HIV subtype B originated in Haiti, Worobey said.

Worobey surmised that the virus was brought to Haiti by workers who had gone to the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly known as Zaire, after it became independent in 1960. THE VIRUS APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN CARRIED TO THE UNITED STATES BY HAITIAN IMMIGRANTS[emphasis added by JB] between 1966 and 1972, according to the mutation timeline.

Researchers have debated for years whether the U.S. epidemic came directly from Africa or through Haiti.

They have also debated whether Americans exported the virus to Haiti via a tourist sex trade that flourished in the late 1970s and early '80s. Worobey said the latest study did "a good job of settling the debate. . . . This shows quite clearly that the data is really only consistent with a Haiti-first origin." JB Comments: Valuing openness to this sort of diversity is lethal, and on quite a large scale.
Added 8-17-08 from: Friday, August 15, 2008

Rampaging Natural Enemies Of The Open City
As found on Dr. John Jay Ray's IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONALquoting from this Source :"...Exotic diseases are on the rise here in the U.S. And although nasty tropical ailments like dengue fever, brucellosis, and schistosomiasis are common in the wilds of Africa, Asia, and South America, they’re becoming hot topics here in States as well. Why? Well, illegal immigration, of course. But no one - especially the media - is willing to come out and tell this truth to the American public. No, that would be offensive to the criminals who stream across our border every day. These diseases from antiquity have no place in 21st century America, but thanks to the unsanitary practices of people from the Third World (liberals would call this part of their “culture”), they’re thriving. And you’ll just love the politically correct euphemism for them: “neglected infections of poverty.” If it didn’t make me so spitting mad, I’d find it hilarious. The cold, hard truth of the matter is that these ailments thrive in conditions that arise from unsanitary living and poor dietary habits. And if that’s offensive to you. well, sorry. It just happens to be the truth.A list of 24 so-called “neglected infections of poverty” were recently listed in a Public Library of Science journal. Many on the list already pose a significant health issue in the U.S., affecting as many as 1 million people. An L.A. Times article I read said that, in the Los Angeles area, the tapeworm infection cysticercosis (which originates with pork, and spreads in crowded, unsanitary conditions) accounts for 10 percent of all seizures that result in emergency room visits. It doesn’t take a huge leap to figure that illegal immigrants in the LA area live in crowded and probably unsanitary conditions. What drives me crazy is that the media is presenting these diseases as though they are diseases of the poor. That’s only partially true. The fact of the matter is that they are typical of the Third World poor, not the American poor. Consider of the source of these diseases: brucellosis is a bacterial infection that comes from unsanitary dairy products. Recently, I wrote to you about the prevalance of “queso fresco” or “bathtub cheese” that’s popular in the immigrant community. That’s where this stuff comes from. Schistosomiasis comes from exposure to water that’s contaminated with freshwater snails. It’s common in South America. I ask you: How many poor folks in the inner cities of the U.S. have had exposure to water contaminated by freshwater snails!?The media and the left are playing a dangerous game with the nation’s public health with their touchy-feely misplaced compassion. Diseased criminals are streaming over our borders and burdening our already overburdened healthcare system with foreign maladies - and no one wants to do anything about it. No one wants to speak the truth or state the facts for fear of being called a racist or a xenophobe. "Quality of population, and the ill effects of tring to force others to act as if they valued openness to damagingly low quality of population, is what is going on here. Pro-diversity even means what one would hope that no intelligent people would ever include in their idea of diversity-value, in effect, they are valuing PATHOGEN diversity. This is another way to know for certain, that unspeakably vicious malice is involved; if you are in effect valuing pathogen diversity along with your general celebration of diversity and openness to it. Not only must there be malice in it, there must be a dishonesty, one that covers for the real aim behind the lies about how diversity makes us stronger and richer in and of itself. Would it be reasonably doubted that officialdom and its professoriate, having once secured the dictatorship and its powers, would still give out this diversity-value line? If not, then the whole dishonest, standards-damaging process would be about power, how to get it.