Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 24, 1990 TAG: 9007240037
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: LENGTH: Short
The tissue was from a 25-year-old sailor who died in 1959, making his the oldest documented case of AIDS. His case, reported in the July 7 issue of The Lancet, a British medical journal, eclipsed those now known to have occurred in the 1960s.
The sailor's case had stumped a large number of doctors, including Sir Robert Platt, then president of the Royal College of Physicians, who was called in as a consultant.
Platt, speculating that the sailor might have a previously unknown viral disease despite symptoms indicating tuberculosis, wrote in the sailor's hospital chart that he wondered "if we are in for a new wave of virus disease now that the bacterial illnesses are so nearly conquered."
However, the state of knowledge and the virological techniques were too crude to allow the scientists to pin down the cause of the sailor's illness.
The new evidence strongly suggests that the AIDS virus, which can take a decade or more to cause disease after it first enters the body, had been transmitted among people since at least the early 1950s, longer than some have suspected.
The case also refutes the widely publicized charges made by Soviet officials several years ago that AIDS arose from a virus that had escaped from a laboratory experiment that went awry or was a biological warfare agent.
The human retrovirus group to which the AIDS virus belongs was unknown at the time. Nor did scientists then have the genetic engineering techniques needed to create a new virus.
by CNB