Breaking News: The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars calls ASFV a zoonotic disease.

"Climate change as well as human overpopulation and industry have drastically altered environments and changed the population dynamics.  These changes are important to understanding new ecosystem interactions but are largely ignored by the organizations tasked with zoonosis research. Organizations, like the previously mentioned One Health, are looking at specific zoonotic diseases like Rift Valley Fever, African Swine Fever, or Zika. But what they are not always doing is monitoring the general environment around the disease vectors. Without sufficient evidence that a species or area is under the threat of a disease, these organizations redirect their resources to locations of high risk."

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/zoonotic-diseases-and-the-possibilities-ebv-monitoring

John Beldekas

(Photo by Jane Teas)

"In August, 1986, John Beldekas was invited to go to the NCI and present his findings on the link between ASFV [African Swine Fever virus] and AIDS, which he did. Beldekas gave samples of all his lab work to Gallo. Later, the government asked Beldekas to turn over all his reagents and lab work to the government, which he did. Beldekas had found ASFV presence in nine of 21 AIDS patients using two standard procedures. At the meeting, Gallo was reported saying: “we know it is not ASFV.” How could Gallo know this as he hadn’t done any of his own tests to look for ASFV?
Two months later, Gallo published an article in Science (Oct 31, 1986) that he discovered a new possible co-factor in AIDS, a virus he called Human B Cell Lymphotropic Virus which he named HBLV. Like ASFV, HBLV infected B cells and also lived in macrophages. Did Gallo steal Beldekas’s ASF virus he found in AIDS patients and rename it HBLV? Later on, when Gallo found that HBLV could also infect other immune cells, he changed the name of HBLV to HHV-6. Eventually, Gallo identified his HBLV as the variant A strain of HHV-6 and called it a human herpesvirus."
--Mark Konlee

http://www.keephopealive.org/report10.html