March
2002
Vegetarian
Advocate: Did Carnivores Cause AIDS?
By Jack Vegetarianberger
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For 20 years human animals have endlessly debated, argued, and speculated
about the cause of AIDS. Humans here and abroad have blamed the CIA,
saying that the boys and girls in Langley created and spread the HIV
virus as part of a biological warfare program. Others have argued that
AIDS was inadvertently spread in Africa via the use of shared needles
in massive polio vaccination programs. And religious fanatics have declared
that God unleashed the AIDS epidemic to punish sinners (though why God
would want to inflect AIDS upon, say, newborn babies is unfathomable
to me). Now, however, the latest scientific evidence strongly suggests
that the spread of AIDS was indirectly caused by the eating habits of
human carnivores.
In January, USA Today, The New York Times, and countless
newspapers around the world reported the newest findings of George
Shaw
of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Beatrice Hahn of the University
of Alabama-Birmingham regarding the cause of AIDS. For the first time,
Hahn and company have discovered the simian AIDS virus in a wild chimpanzee,
supporting the idea that the human AIDS virus originated in chimps.
Hahn’s animal research for this project was reportedly noninvasive;
samples of feces and urine left behind by wild chimps were collected
for study in the Gombe Research Center in Tanzania, in Uganda and in
the Tai forest of Ivory Coast.
How was the simian AIDS virus transferred to humans? According to Hahn
and others, it appears that AIDS started in West Central Africa and
most likely made the leap into humans when hunters slaughtered chimps
for “bush meat.” Apparently, the virus first infected humans
through bites and blood exposure when hunting or butchering chimpanzees.
The notion that the AIDS virus was transferred from nonhuman animals
to human animals via the hunting or butchering of chimpanzees for the
consumption of their flesh first gained widespread publicity back in
1999 when Hahn and her scientific team announced they had discovered
the simian AIDS virus in the tissue of Marilyn, a chimp used in medical
research. Marilyn lost her life in the mid-1980s while giving birth
to a pair of stillborn babies in captivity. About ten years later,
Hahn
had received the chimp’s tissue from another scientist. Hahn’s
subsequent tissue analysis uncovered the simian AIDS virus.
Hahn’s finding was reported widely. The New York Times,
for example, wrote about Hahn’s research in a front-page article
titled “H.I.V. Is Linked To a Subspecies of Chimpanzee.” The
article stated that “the simian virus was closely related to H.I.V.-1,
the type of AIDS virus that has caused the overwhelming majority of
cases in the world. Since the virus jumped to humans, most probably
through bites and exposure to blood in hunting and dressing of chimpanzees,
it has been transmitted among humans to infect an estimated 30 million
people in the world.”
Likewise, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Based on studying
current cultural practices in several West African countries, virologists
believe humans were infected by the primate virus through blood contact
during the hunting and slaughtering of the chimps for food... The current
infection is probably the result of many exposures in recent decades
resulting from the growing increase in the killing of primates for
human
consumption that is accompanying the incursion of civilization and
logging commerce into the wild.”
What is significant about the Hahn team’s most recent discovery
is that the simian AIDS virus was found in a male chimpanzee living
in a chimp colony in Tanzania. Significant because the simian AIDS virus
was found for the first time in wild chimps (which also gave more validity
to the finding in Marilyn’s tissue) and because it gave the researchers
a better idea of the region in Africa where AIDS might have begun, so
now researchers can narrow their in-field research to West Central Africa.
(No one knows exactly where in Africa Marilyn had been abducted from
for medical research.) While Hahn’s findings are not the final
word on the cause of AIDS, they are the best possible evidence to date.
And widely accepted.
During the last 20 years, more than 15 million persons have died from
AIDS. Yet, Hahn’s finding that the eating habits of carnivores
probably caused the AIDS virus to enter the human species has resulted
in, to the best of my knowledge, no public commentary or large-scale
reflection among human carnivores. I have yet to read a newspaper or
magazine article, be it a news or opinion piece, mulling over the idea
that the diet of human carnivores has resulted in one of the most deadly
epidemics in recorded human history.
So, the next time Michael Meathead starts talking about how healthy
meat is, please point out to Michael that meat eating—besides increasing
a human’s risk of cancer, be it of the breast, stomach, colon,
prostrate, or wherever; heart disease; diabetes; and other diseases—is
probably responsible for unleashing the AIDS epidemic upon the planet.
That might shut him up.
A full report of the research by Shaw and Hahn was published in the
January 18, 2002 issue of Science magazine.
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