Europeans immune to HIV

[Angelcynn Beorn]

Well, a slightly misleading title, but it does have a grain of truth in it. I just saw National Geographic program which showed theres at least a similarity, if not a link, between plague and AIDS. Since Europe was heavily infected with plague during the black death Europeans developed a somewhat limited resistance to plague which transfers very well to resistance to AIDS. Rather than write up an article myself im gonna be lazy and link to another one instead. Tell me what you think.

http://nagyxp.scolly.net.au/index.php?p=55&c=1

[Dr. Solar Wolff]

Yes, there was an article in Scientific American sometime in 1997 stating exactly this premise. It went on to say that a small percentage of Europeans are immune, absolutely immune to AIDS. They tried to explain it in terms of population genetics but did a bad job. The particular allele is a homozygous recessive and its frequency is .01 in extreme Northern Europe (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia). Going South, its frequency declines until it is zero South of Italy and East of Greece.

In the hetrozygous form, this allele confirs partial immunity so the individual infected shows delayed symptoms which can drag on for years.

Here is the breakdown that Scientific American didn't want to give:

Frequency in N. European Population

Homozygous Recessive: .01
Hetrozygous Condition: .10

The square root of the homozygous recessive can give us a very close approximation of that gene's frequency in the population or you can do Hardy-Weinberg: P + Q2 (squared) for any two alleles. In this case: P=.99, Q=.01

This means over one person in ten carries the gene for AIDS immunity in Northern Europe.