[Press Kit, International Conference on AIDS (13th : 2000 : Durban, South Africa), compiled by the International AIDS Society]

...IAS
1 ERNATIONAL. SOCIETY.... T Y-BACKGROUND NOTE
20 YEARS OF HIV/AIDS EPIDEMIC
and a prologue of 70 years ago
HIV/AIDS is a disease that can summarize the distinctive features of our time: AIDS if
caused by HIV, a virus, that is a sequence of information. This disease is spreading to
such an extent to acquire the dimension of a pandemic: that is happening in the era of
information and of personal media. But the information contained in the virus must be
communicated for the contagion to happen.
Perhaps, the HIV infection is the only one that was covered since the early beginning by
the television, the radio and the newspapers which testified its diffusion and impact day
by day.
It has been written that there is no epidemic - and no contagion - if there is not
communication, that is spreading and sharing of information about the awareness of the
existence of the disease and its transmission from person to person. In one sense is the
West of the world, with its science and technology, to communicate to the South of the
world that AIDS is present and, metaphorically to infect it.
On the turning point of the new millennium, it can be useful running through again the
20 years of infection history, that is an area of medicine characterized by the quick piling
up of so much information in so short time. The communication processes have been
speeded up so intensively to actually cancel the lag time between the understanding of
the disease within the scientific community and the lay opinion creation upon the HIV
infection.
Prologue
In order to define the prologue of HIV infection, draw pathways and detail times, in
other word to reconstruct the HIV genealogical tree, information technologies has been
widely used.
1931 This if the year of the identification of the oldest ancestor of HIV-1.
A group of investigators from the Department of Energy's of the Los Alamos
National Laboratory estimated that the closest ancestor of the most common
HIV-1 strain (responsible for the AIDS pandemic) appeared in the early 30s, that
is thirty years before the oldest and available blood HIV positive sample.
The paper has been published in June 2000 on Science and details a research that
has been carried out by the biologist Bette Korber and the physicist Tanmoy
Bhattacharya who used the ultra fast supercomputer Nirvana to analyze all the
data regarding the HIV-1 sequences stored in the Los Alamos AIDS and Human

Retroviruses database with the purpose of dating the origin of the HIV strains
which caused the infection of more than 50 million people worldwide until now.