first human HIV infection 100 years ago

An eight year study, published in scientific journal Nature, claims the HIV-1 virus that leads to AIDS could have infected humans around 1908 in Africa. Scientists found traces of the HIV-1 genome collected in 1960 from a woman who lived in Léopoldville, presently called Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. An earlier study had also isolated the virus from a 1959 blood sample of a male from Léopoldville. Study of both the samples and estimate of the rate at which the virus mutates over time has led the researchers to conclude that the human strain could have been around since 100 years.

The study, co-sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, was carried out by Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona in Tuscon, Arizona and colleagues from the United States, France, Belgium, Australia, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Denmark.