Mr. Dickson”s commentary in the June 20 Record-Bee was absurd. The first AIDS case in the United States was tracked down over fifteen years ago. It was a male flight attendant, who died in St. Louis in 1976. He died of a mysterious malady, and so tissue samples were kept frozen. Subsequent analysis some years later revealed that he died of AIDS. The man was quite closed- mouthed. He never revealed where he might have contracted the disease. Given the routes of the planes he was on, Haiti seemed the place of infection.
As for the Hepatitis B vaccine trials, vaccines use either dead or attenuated organisms that cause the disease. To speculate that hepatitis could become the AIDS virus is mind boggling and reminds me of the rampant speculation of the 80s where some over-exuberant scientists even suggested that AIDS was a mutated syphilis spirochete!
We won”t go into the fact that one disease is a virus and the other a bacteria. In the United States, AIDS is mainly a disease of gay men and drug users because the disease is transferred by an exchange of bodily fluids. Over the last several decades, heterosexual transmission only accounts for four percent of AIDS cases in the U.S., and this number has remained stable.
However, in Africa, AIDS is a heterosexual disease because African heterosexuals practice anal sex. I will not go into the mechanics of anal sex, leaving that to your sex education class, but this practice is accompanied by abrasions, which cause an exchange of bodily fluids with blood. The importance of the AIDS epidemic in Africa is that it would be impossible for the disease to have spread throughout Africa if the disease was created in America, given the short time span.
In fact, the reason that AIDS spread so rapidly across the United States was due to gay men having multiple sexual contacts with different persons within a twenty-four hour period. Heterosexuals almost always have only one contact per evening. In the twilight of the 70s and the early 80s, the bath houses in San Francisco contributed to the lighting fast spread of AIDS across the United States precisely because the bath houses insured multiple contacts per day. There was not, nor is, anything comparable in Africa.
It is not unusual for disease in one species to mutate to another. The swine flu epidemic of the early 20th century, and the bird flu of this century are two examples. Chimpanzees have a virus very similar to AIDS in humans, but does not seem to affect them. The probability is that this virus mutated to infect humans and came to the United States from Haiti.
Unlike Mr. Dickson and other conspiracy theorists, the Afro-American community can be somewhat forgiven for their conviction that the government caused AIDS because of the syphilis experiments at Tuskegee where syphilis was allowed to go untreated in thirty African-American men so doctors could see how the disease progressed. Needless to say, this example was a medical aberration, roundly condemned once it became known, but it certainly gave some credence to African Americans that officials could be responsible for AIDS.
Charles Moton
Lucerne
