AIDS - A man-made nightmare?

Many teams of scientists have studied the origins of AIDS over the past two decades.
Though their findings may differ on the exact details of when and where the first human infections took place, the explanation as to how the disease came to be passed on to mankind remains consistent.
The "cut hunter" theory, that a Central African tribesman caught HIV through contact between a wound on his skin and the blood of an infected chimp, is widely accepted as the primary cause of the outbreak.
In 1999, a team from the University of Alabama used the remains of a chimpanzee named Marilyn to prove that AIDS was transmitted to humans from a single subspecies of chimps that carry the strain of virus that affects man.
Consensus on exactly when the virus was communicated is hard to come by, but most scientists seem fairly convinced that it happened at the start of the 20th century, although cases may have existed as early as 1880.
The first reported human victim of AIDS was discovered in the Leopoldville region of the modern day Democratic Republic of Congo in 1959.
When the virus started to spread, it was mainly carried through sailors, merchants and other travellers who visited Central Africa and returned to the West.
It was initially carried to the US through Haitian immigrants who had worked in the Congo, and began to spread undetected thanks to its long incubation period and lack of obvious early symptoms.
Suggestions that it could have been carried to America through a gay Canadian air steward called Gaetan Dugas are little more than an urban myth.
Though Dugas did spread the disease to 40 of the first 248 people to catch it, he was not the "patient zero" character some have made him out to be.
In all likelihood, the virus had already been spreading for a decade before Dugas even contracted it, and would certainly have devastated the US regardless of the role of one individual.

In the mid-90s a book by Dr Leonard Horowitz lit a fire under the conspiracy community.
Emerging Viruses, which argues that the government used a Hepatitis B vaccination programme to secretly spread AIDS to the black and gay communities, became one of the most controversial texts on the AIDS conspiracy.
Horowitz argues that the virus was weaponised by the US government and used as a means of population control.
His book brought the conspiracy theory to the attention of the mainstream media, and gained the backing of scores of black community leaders who argue to this day that the government deliberately spread the virus inside the US.
The most notable believer in the theory is Dr Jeremiah Wright, the firebrand priest who almost scuppered former congregation member Barack Obama's presidential bid with his controversial views.
A large part of the black community's conviction that AIDS was spread deliberately comes from the precedent set by the Tuskegee syphilis study in the 1930s. During this controversial experiment, for which President Bill Clinton issued a formal apology in the mid-90s, government-funded researchers denied treatment to black patients infected with a sexually transmitted disease to study the effects.
Conspiracy theorists claim any government that would consider an approach like this is more than capable of spreading the AIDS virus on purpose, covering the project up and then blaming the gay community.
Not all theories on the AIDS virus blame direct government connivance for the spread of the disease.
The "polio vaccine" theory suggests that a contaminated chimpanzee kidney may have been responsible for the disease being transmitted to millions of people in the Congo.
According to this hypothesis, a Polish virologist called Hilary Koprowski's experiments with an oral polio vaccine derived from a chimp kidney culture could have spread the animal form of the infection to millions during the late 1950s. This led to a mutation in the virus to form the present HIV infection.
These two schools of conspiracy theorist thinking bitterly oppose one another, but are united in their belief that the official story is a fabrication, and that the origins of AIDS are yet to be fully explained.

- In a 2005 study almost half of African Americans surveyed by Oregon University said they believed the AIDS virus had been invented in a government laboratory. Prominent backing from senior black priests, including Jeremiah Wright, has helped the conspiracy theory gain traction in the community.

- Dr Koprowski's polio vaccine experiments were hurried, and could have been the gateway for the chimp form of HIV to enter enough human hosts in order to allow a mutation.

- The US government did pour billions into biological weapons research in the 1950s and 1960s. AIDS has all the same characteristics as the killer disease they aimed to create. While there may be no direct link to a US lab, the circumstantial evidence suggests it could have been possible for the US to invent AIDS.

- The Tuskegee syphilis experiments in the 1930s reveal a worrying precedent of the government covertly experimenting on the black community. The Hepatitis vaccine theory clearly has its origins in this historical conspiracy.

- While the "cut hunter" official story is widely accepted in medical circles the scientific evidence produced to back it up has been questioned by notable scientists. It may be the most likely theory, but it has yet to be comprehensively proved.

- No direct link has ever been established between the US government and the development of the AIDS pathogen.

- The Hepatitis vaccine theory has no supporting medical data. No cultures were taken, no experiments were carried out and no evidence has been produced to show that those vaccines administered to members of the black community contained the AIDS virus.

- While the Polio vaccine theory is more plausible, it fails to establish a conspiracy and rather points to incompetence and haste leading to the outbreak.

- The hypothesis that the infection was originally transmitted through a diseased chimp to a hunter may not be watertight, but it is the most plausible scientific account so far, and would explain how the virus mutated and why it spread gradually through sailors and Haitian workers to the West.

- The fight against the AIDS epidemic has consistently been hampered by urban myths, conspiracy theories and prejudice. Not only are theories about the government administering the disease factually suspect, they present a real risk to efforts to control the further spread of the infection.

The global AIDS epidemic has devastated millions of lives. It's origins may be shrouded in mystery, but the same could be said of almost any major disease outbreak throughout history. The fact that the US government had the resources and may have had the know-how to invent a virus as deadly as HIV is undeniable. But there is absolutely no evidence that they did so. Furthermore, they had little to gain by destroying vast swathes of their own population and killing millions in Africa and Europe along the way. The disease almost certainly came from a single colony of chimpanzees, and spread to humans through the ancient hunting and slaughtering practices that African tribesman have practiced for generations. Far from being a man-made nightmare, AIDS is a tragic reminder of the power of nature, and the catastrophic impact that a new disease can have on mankind....