Origin of HIV in the U.S.

In the U.S. and Europe, the predominant strain of HIV is HIV-1 group M subtype B. Although the origin of this strain in central Africa is clear, less is known about how the virus subsequently spread to the U.S. and the rest of the developed world. To address this question, an international team of investigators performed a comprehensive analysis of data from the Los Alamos National Laboratory HIV sequence database, supplemented by sequence data from archived HIV samples obtained from five Haitian immigrants who developed AIDS before 1982.

Phylogenetic analysis was performed to compare the env and gag sequences of the archived Haitian HIV strains with available well-defined, nonduplicative subgroup B and D sequences in the Los Alamos database…