26 Years, Not 25. The website of the flagship station of the ABC television network, WABC New York, today heads its third top story of the day, "Today marks 25 years since the discovery of AIDS". Not so. That's just another lie about AIDS. Do the math, literally.
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On page 12 of the January 1982 issue of Discover magazine, in the feature "In the News", appears as third item a three-paragraph story titled "Outbreak". It leads off with this key information:

The Centers for Disease Control has reported the outbreak of two rare, serious diseases among homosexual men. In the past year and a half, CDC recorded about 170 cases of Pneumocystis pneumonia and a cancer called Kaposi's sarcoma.

Translation: AIDS began to be noticed a year and a half before January 1982: mid-1980, not mid-1981. So why are we being told it started a year later?
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When I went to the Discover magazine website to see if I could refer readers to an archival copy of that article, I found another matter that has irritated me, the assertions that the great preponderance of native populations of the Americas were wiped out by European diseases. I was thinking only yesterday, "Where are the bones?" Bones last for centuries, and if 90% of the population was wiped out by disease, the remaining population couldn't have buried the bulk of corpses. The entire continent should be strewn with bones, but it's not, is it?
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Well, it turns out that there were plagues of varying sizes abroad in Mexico, but (a) not that killed off 90% of the population and (b) not necessarily of European origin.

If cocolitzli [an Aztec name for a plague they suffered] had been caused by a hemorrhagic virus, [Mexican researcher] Acuña-Soto realized, the Spanish could not have brought it with them. Such diseases do not readily pass from one person to another, so the virus must have been native.

This raised two questions. First, were people prepared to absolve the Spanish of responsibility for one of the great evils of the colonial era? The destruction of ancient Mexico's culture by the Spanish invaders is an integral part of every Mexican's understanding of the country's history. The miseries of the plague years are taken as object lessons in the evils of colonialism. "My grandmother wrote histories, and the terrible things that the Spanish did were always a part of them," says Acuña-Soto. The second question was rooted in science: If the Spanish didn't bring about the cocolitzli, what did?

His answer? Horrendous, extended drought weakened people and concentrated disease-carrying rodents in the same areas as people. When the rains returned, the rodent population exploded, and so did the plague they carried. Could be.
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But the suggestion that the population of Mexico went from 22 million to 2 million in 100 years seems preposterous. There is no comparable drop in population anywhere else on Earth, and human populations have always bounced back from plagues. The Black Death killed, we think, between 1/3 and 1/2 the people of the area from China to Europe that it ravaged, but the populations came back. And as for populations outside Mexico, there is no reason to think any such disease spread throughout the continent. Quite the contrary, where drought did not exist and neither animal nor human populations mixed, there is no reason to think there was any such drastic die-off. Again, where are the bones?
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People believe a lot of things that are just not true — things that make no sense or are just plain false, such as that AIDS appeared 25 years ago, when it actually appeared 26 years ago. Why would media lie? Why would Discover magazine, which has proof in its own pages that the claim is false, not explode the lie? I don't know.
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Discover's website shows archives going back only to 1992. But any major library should have the January 1982 issue, if you'd like to see for yourself that at the bottom of the middle column of page 12 of its January 1982 issue a major American magazine said plainly that AIDS started in mid-1980, not mid-1981, check it out in the library. I don't ask you to trust me. Just trust your own eyes.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,471.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:00 PM