AIDS likely made the leap from chimpanzees to humans because of a starving World War I soldier who, according to a new book, had to hunt the animals for food.
The unknown ‘Patient Zero’ was part of an invading force of 1,600 Belgian and French troops who, along with 4,000 African assistants, had traveled from Leopoldville in the Belgian Congo to a remote outpost in Cameroon, says Canadian microbiologist Jacques Pepin, who once worked . as a bush doctor in Central Africa in the 1980s.
Pepin, a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at the Universite de Sherbrooke in Quebec, focuses on the intriguing hypothesis in a new edition of his famous book, “Origins of AIDS.”
Patient Zero was likely injured after killing a subspecies of chimpanzees – Pan troglodytes troglodytes – infected with a monkey virus that was a precursor to HIV, or the human immunodeficiency virus, the virus that causes AIDS, Pepin writes in the book recently published by Cambridge is published. University Press.
In a 2011 edition of the seminal book, Pippin originally posited that the HIV jump from chimpanzees to humans was after an injured African hunter killed one of the beasts and became infected in the process in 1921. Pippin then tells how the spread of the virus around the world was fueled by colonization, prostitution and ‘well-meaning’ public health campaigns that lacked current safety protocols, such as needle sharing.
In the second edition, out this month, Pepin draws on research in medical archives in Africa and Europe, suggesting that ‘Patient Zero’ was not an indigenous hunter, but instead a starving World War I soldier who had to hunt chimpanzees for food when his regiment got stuck. in the remote forest around Moloundou, Cameroon and without food supplies.
Most books on AIDS begin in 1981, when a group of gay men in the United States began to die after contracting virulent pneumonia. Since then, HIV has killed 33 million people and infected nearly 76 million people around the world.
“Some might say it is irrelevant to understand the past,” Pippin writes in the introduction to the new edition of his book. “We have a moral obligation to the millions of people who have died or will die from this infection. Second, this tragedy was made possible (or even caused) by human intervention: colonization, urbanization, and probably well-intentioned public health campaigns. “