Return of the Three "H"s

[bcholmes]

A new claim that HIV came to the US from Haiti. In the early eighties, the story that HIV came from Haiti decimated the tourist industry in Haiti, and no evidence was ever found to support the assertion. I wonder if the new claim holds any water.

Comments

[disastrid.livejournal.com]

i thought it was the four H's - haemophiliacs, homosexuals, heroin users, and haitians.

i also thought that it had long been established that the four H's were arbitrary and completely unfounded. in the early 90s it came from africa. HIV is always coming from far-off exotic places it seems, i don't know why the media is so quick to uphold this ridiculousness.

hilariously, the queer theory prof i had always used to forget heroin users every time he talked about the H's and would say "you know, i always wanna say hos."

[professor-booty.livejournal.com]

I'm more curious about the observation that AIDS broke out right after Hepatitis-B vaccination programs in American gay communities, in the late 70s...and after smallpox vaccination programs in Africa during the same period. But you've probably heard that conspiracy theory.

[lakme.livejournal.com]

I have read that before, but only as an urban legend kind of thing...that the US government purchased Haitians as medical research subjects and deliberately infected them with the virus from the monkeys that had it first. That article doesn't have a lick of evidence in it though, so it's no more believable than the urban legend.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

It's not that far-fetched. When I used to make polio vaccine, the virus was grown on green monkey kidney cells - and the monkeys were caught in the wild. We tested for anything we knew about, but it's entirely possible that lots we would be contaminated with viruses we didn't test for.

I don't know what smallpox and Hep-B were grown on back in those days, but polio is a prime candidate for contamination because green monkeys are known to harbour the virus and was used in massive innoculation campaigns. One of the things I worked on while I was there was moving production over to continuous lines of human cells.

[avt-tor.livejournal.com]

The article doesn't offer a lot of details, but it seems to say that one person got HIV in the Congo and came to Haiti, infected a few other people, and one of those then went to the United States. The movement of single individuals who happen to have a non-quarantined disease may be useful in studying epidemiology, but it doesn't have relevance otherwise.