Does Ebola have you wondering about the sources of disease? Or, for mass tort professionals, perhaps you are wondering about the reasons for so many peritoneal mesotheliomas, as well as the role of genomic changes and other molecular changes. With questions of that sort in mind, it’s interesting to note that a multi-disciplinary team has now used forensic genomics to trace – they think – the origins of HIV to the early 1900s in an African city that was a hub for travel. The paper is published in Science, one of the world’s top two journals for articles of general interest across many fields of science. The answer is not necessarily the key – the larger point is the ability to undertake the analysis, and the new tools built for the analysis. Imagine what might be done some day with diseases related to mass tort claims.
ScienceDaily has the short version of the story in an October 2, 2014 article. The full article is: N. R. Faria, A. Rambaut, M. A. Suchard, G. Baele, T. Bedford, M. J. Ward, A. J. Tatem, J. D. Sousa, N. Arinaminpathy, J. Pepin, D. Posada, M. Peeters, O. G. Pybus, P. Lemey. The early spread and epidemic ignition of HIV-1 in human populations. Science, 2014; 346 (6205): 56 DOI: 10.1126/science.1256739
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