Yesterday was AIDS Day. It has been celebrated annually by the U.S. government until this year. What a shame. But that’s the nature of the current administration, ignore what’s important and emphasize what can hurt the people.
For me, on the other hand I just finished a book on emerging diseases and just started one on retroviruses.
Spillover presented an excellent coverage of diseases, typically viruses that jumped from other animals to humans. This book covered an amazing array of diseases and their animal hosts. It included the discovery of retroviruses which included HIV and SIV. SIV, Simian Immuno Virus affects non-human Primates in Africa. It was several strains of SIV that lead to HIV-1 and HIV-2. Also, it was determined that Patient-Zero got the first SIV/HIV around 1908, well before the major emergence of HIV around 1980.
Virus Hunting by Robert Gallo covers retroviruses. Retroviruses are RNA viruses that are capable of creating DNA and inserting it into host DNA. The DNA then codes for the production of more viruses. Humans are actually imperfect hosts since, at least in the beginning died quickly after getting HIV and having it become AIDS. That situation has improved tremendously since the 1980s. Now, HIV is not a death sentence, instead it has become a chronic disease needing medication to survive.
To be honest I read both of these books shortly after they came out. All of this reading was fueled by reading The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett.
More on this book later.
See you soon.
Michael's Place 
Thank you for pointing out that yesterday was World AIDS day. I work in a hospital and didn’t even know it was, nor did I hear it mentioned on NPR.How quickly we all forget and how the executive branch WANTS everyone to forget. Thanks for the book recommendations, I had forgotten about the Gallo book. It is snowing here (maybe the storm you had Sun?) and because I drive far north for work, I took a vacation day, so nice!
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