AIDS probably made the leap from chimpanzees to humans because of a hungry World War I soldier who was forced to hunt animals for food, according to a new book.
The unknown “zero patient” was part of an invading force of 1,600 Belgian and French soldiers who, along with 4,000 African assistants, had traveled from Leopoldville to 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 University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, makes the interesting hypothesis the focus of a new edition of his famous book, “Origins of AIDS.”
The “zero patient” was probably injured after killing a subspecies of chimpanzee – Pan troglodytes troglodytes – infected with a simian virus that was a precursor to HIV, or the human immunodeficiency virus, the virus that causes AIDS, writes Pepin in the recently published volume from Cambridge University Press.
In a 2011 issue of the seminal book, Pepin initially claimed that HIV jumped from chimpanzees to humans after an injured African hunter killed one of the beasts in 1921, becoming infected in the process. Pepin then recounts how the virus was spread throughout the world by colonization, prostitution and “well-intentioned” public health campaigns that did not have what are now common safety protocols, such as banning the distribution of needles.
In the second edition, released this month, Pepin draws on research in medical archives in Africa and Europe, suggesting that “Patient Zero” was not a native hunter, but instead a hungry World War I soldier forced to hunt. chimpanzees for food when his regiment was stranded in the remote forest around Moloundou, Cameroon and ran out of food.
Most books on AIDS begin in 1981, when a group of gay men in the United States began dying after contracting virulent pneumonia. Since then, HIV has killed 33 million and infected nearly 76 million people worldwide.
“Some might say that understanding the past is irrelevant,” Pepin writes in the introduction to the new edition of his book. “We have a moral obligation to the millions of human beings who have died or will die because of this infection. Second, this tragedy was facilitated (or even caused) by human interventions: colonization, urbanization, and probably well-intentioned public health campaigns. ”