PMID: 2483891Sep 1, 1989Paper

[AIDS in Africa].

Annali di igiene : medicina preventiva e di comunità
R SansoneP Strigini

Abstract

While AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) certainly represents a worldwide health problem, the attention of many researchers and epidemiologists, besides the WHO itself, has recently focused on Africa for the following reasons: 1) The etiologic agent of AIDS, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) (previously named HTLV-III or LAV) is likely to have originated in Africa. Solid evidence has been accumulated that antibodies against HIV were present in African sera collected in the early 1960s. In the same period widespread infection by viruses strictly related to HIV has been documented in primates living in tropical Africa. A second type of HIV (now named HIV-2 and previously known as HTLV-IV or LAV-2) which is responsible for a milder AIDS-related disease, has been subsequently identified in West African inhabitants with its own simian correlate. Although epidemiological evidence for the presence of AIDS in Africa in these early periods is scanty, sporadic cases have retrospectively been identified. 2) Up to 1986, AIDS epidemiology in Africa has been hampered by inconsistency of demographic data, inadequacy of public health services and difficulty of obtaining the necessary laboratory evidence. The few data available (Zai...Continue Reading

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