Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1998. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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The San Francisco Examiner; February, 3, 1998
Lisa M. Krieger, Examiner Medical Writer
While the modern world rocked to Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, an African tribesman died of a mysterious disease in 1959 in a clinic in Leopoldville, Belgian Congo - what is now Kinshasa, Republic of Congo, Dr. Toufu Zhu of the University of Washington in Seattle reports in the Feb. 5 issue of the journal Nature.
"This is to date the oldest known HIV case," Dr. David Ho, head of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Rockefeller University and a co-author of the study, said Tuesday at the Fifth Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Chicago, where the study was presented.
The African man was not the world's first AIDS case, scientists add, but probably became infected within 10 years of the introduction of the virus into humans from chimpanzees.
The African man had first turned up at the clinic with symptoms somewhat resembling sickle cell anemia. Doctors kept samples of his blood - and decades later, Ho's team carefully analyzed it.
The genetic analysis of the blood shows clear signs of the AIDS virus.
Genesis in '40s or '50s
Because scientists know the steady rate at which HIV mutates, they can calculate backward and conclude that the virus probably jumped species sometime in the 1940s or early '50s.
The scientists compared the genes from the old sample of HIV with those carried by current versions of HIV, which have infected more than 40 million people worldwide.
"We realized that if we had an old sequence" of HIV genes, "it would serve as a yardstick to measure the evolution of the current HIV," Ho said.
HIV has mutated over the years to form 10 distinct subtypes, lettered A through J. One of these, subtype B, is the dominant strain in the United States and Europe, while subtype D is most common in Africa.
The family tree of HIV looks like a bush with the various subtypes forming the limbs.
Ho said the 1959 HIV is near the trunk, around the point where subtypes B and D branch off. This suggests that HIV could not have existed for many years before 1959.
"This is no doubt an ancestor to B and D," he said.
One big crossover
The "Big Bang" radiation in HIV types suggests that all the current strains of the AIDS virus evolved from a single introduction of HIV into people, rather than from many crossovers from animals to humans, as some have speculated.
Of several suspect samples taken from Africa, this was the only one positively shown to be infected with HIV, they said.
The virus in the sample had degraded, but the scientists were able to isolate four small fragments of two viral genes. One gene holds instructions for assembling the outer coat of the virus, while the other is code for one of the proteins the virus needs to reproduce. The early genetic snapshot of HIV may allow experts to predict how the virus will evolve over the next 10 or 15 years.
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