NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Perhaps it wasn't sex workers and
fast-growing cities that launched HIV onto its deadly global
rampage, but well-meaning doctors using dirty needles in the
first half of the 20th century. While it's hard to know for sure
today, more than 90 years after the virus emerged, two new
studies hint that campaigns to eradicate tropical diseases in
Africa might have helped HIV gain an early foothold among
humans. "This is sort of an example of good intentions gone
wrong," said Dr. Thomas Strickland, an expert in infectious
diseases at Baltimore's University of Maryland, who was not
involved in the research. "They were saving lives. They just
didn't know that they were also setting up the pandemic of HIV."
The virus jumped from chimps to humans -- morphing from simian
immunodeficiency virus, or SIV, to human immunodeficiency virus
-- in central Africa in the early 1920s. Most likely, scientists
speculate, a hunter got infected through a bite or a scratch as
he prowled for bush meat and butch