HIV and AIDS

"It's been determined that they [people with HIV who do not succumb to AIDS] all share a genetic uniqueness, are all of European ancestry, and that the rare gene was selected for in the European population because it also protected against the Black Death. Everyone without that rare gene who harbors the virus develops AIDS within a decade...."  Comment left to a discussion about Harpers Magazine publishing a well-known HIV-AIDS denier, Celia Farber on the Nation Magazine blog.

Did I miss something?  Is the above statement true?   Says who?  Just curious, that's all.

Comments

[ellen]

Where do people come up with this stuff?

[Lab Kat]

And, you can get AIDS through kissing.

*snorts*

[wanda]

The Lord knows there's some strange ideas out there. That's a pretty broad generalization to make. I wonder if it's based in any actual facts. Is there any reliable research to support this supposition?
Then again with all the weirdness in the world not much surprises me these days.

[jaye]

Well, she should meet my WASP Northern European type friends who died of AIDS, and my Hispanic friends, and my black friends...

[Jack]

The beauty of the net. You can find comments about anything and everything, true or otherwise.

[Kathy]

There was a special on PBS about it some time ago.

[Peter]

I came up with some interesting stuff on the internet:

Plague Debunked As Link to AIDS Immunity

Possible support for the above claim: Genetic HIV Resistance Deciphered:

Genetic resistance to AIDS works in different ways and appears in different ethnic groups. The most powerful form of resistance, caused by a genetic defect, is limited to people with European or Central Asian heritage. An estimated 1 percent of people descended from Northern Europeans are virtually immune to AIDS infection, with Swedes the most likely to be protected. One theory suggests that the mutation developed in Scandinavia and moved southward with Viking raiders.

All those with the highest level of HIV immunity share a pair of mutated genes -- one in each chromosome -- that prevent their immune cells from developing a "receptor" that lets the AIDS virus break in. If the so-called CCR5 receptor -- which scientists say is akin to a lock -- isn't there, the virus can't break into the cell and take it over.

To be protected, people must inherit the genes from both parents; those who inherit a mutated gene from just one parent will end up with greater resistance against HIV than other people, but they won't be immune. An estimated 10 percent to 15 percent of those descended from Northern Europeans have the lesser protection.

See also HIV Immunity in the PBS Library.

Scientists like to say “correlation is not causation”; if you see x follow y a million times, they are going to resist the urge to say “y caused x”. I find the statement “everyone without that rare gene who harbors the virus develops AIDS within a decade" a bit strong.

[Wenchy]

Africa has some wonderfully strange ideas.

Btw, I LOVE the new look to your site!!!

[Tulip]

irrespective of this interesting topic, you're a HANDSOME DEVIL, you know.

[sfmike]

When AIDS first arrived in the early 80's, I asked my best-read friend if there was anything good to read about the Black Plague since it looked like we were going there again. He recommended the Italian National Novel, "I Promessi Sposi" or "The Betrothed" by Alessandro Manzoni, the guy for whom Verdi wrote his Requiem.

It's a nineteenth-century historical novel about Milan in the 15th century, I believe, in Milan. There are a pair of young country lovers who are separated at the beginning of the novel and spend 600 pages surviving food riots, nunneries, rapacious aristocrats, and for the last third of the novel The Plague, where the population of Milan goes from 240,000 to 80,000 in six months.

What was most interesting to me was that basically everyone got exposed to the disease, but only about two-thirds of them died. A lot of people in the surviving third came down with the disease but managed to pull through. And there was a certain percentage of folk whose bodies just dealt with it completely asymptomatically.

AIDS has pretty much followed the same pattern, though it's harder to contract than the plague. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were some genetic "survival" genes among certain people, though I wouldn't be so racist as to proclaim it was only certain Europeans. Plagues have always been with us, everywhere in the world.