AIDS and the Black Death

[ewx]

I'd seen this mentioned a couple of times recently, though the date indicates it's not the freshest of news. It left me wondering if there was any downside to having the mutation mentioned.

Comments

[aldabra]

All your friends keep dying of plagues?

[aldabra]

Besides, wasn't the Black Death before the colonisation of America by Europeans? So they should have taken it with them?

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Err. I don't see anything that says it's not as widespread in European-descended Americans as in their stay-at-home cousins? (I'd normally include ‘Europeans who happen to have lived overseas for a few generations’ as ‘Europeans’ for genetic purposes, I think, but I wouldn't presume to be an authority on the terminology of the field.)

[liv]

I think people can be quite wary of making a big fanfare that "some people are naturally immune to AIDS" because it can plausibly lead to increased promiscuity / less safe sexual practices. It's one of those weird things that can happen on a population scale even if no individual would actually think, well, some people have this mutation so probably I have it, so I don't need to worry about safe sex.

But I don't know if that's the reason, sometimes old science just generates excitement in the media and there's no identifiable reasons for either the delay or for the eventual release.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

A more depressing analysis might be that AIDS is just not big enough news in the West for ‘a small proportion of people are immune’ to make a big splash. (Which would be myopic for several reasons, not all of them to do with local infection rates, but there you go.)