AIDS epidemic may stem from WWI soldier, book reveals

AIDS likely passed from chimps to humans, according to a new book, because of a starving WWI soldier who was forced to hunt animals for food.

The unknown “Patient Zero” was part of an invading force of 1,600 Belgian and French soldiers who, along with 4,000 African helpers, had traveled from Leopoldville in the Belgian Congo to a remote outpost in Cameroon, the official said. Canadian microbiologist Jacques Pepin, who used to work. as a bush doctor in Central Africa in the 1980s.

Pepin, professor in the Department of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, makes this intriguing hypothesis the subject of a new edition of his famous book, “Origins of AIDS”.

“Patient Zero” was probably injured after killing a subspecies of chimpanzee – Pan troglodytes troglodytes – infected with a simian virus that was a precursor to HIV, or Human Immunodeficiency Virus, the virus that causes AIDS, writes Pepin in the volume recently published by Cambridge University Press.

In a 2011 edition of the seminal book, Pepin originally postulated that HIV jumped from chimps to humans after an injured African hunter killed one of the beasts in 1921, becoming infected in the process. Pepin then recounts how the spread of the virus was fueled around the world by colonization, prostitution, and “well-meaning” public health campaigns that lacked now-mainstream safety protocols, such as a ban on sharing needles.

In the second edition, published this month, Pepin draws on research in medical records in Africa and Europe suggesting that “ Patient Zero ” was not an indigenous hunter, but rather a starving soldier from the World War I forced to hunt chimpanzees for food when his regiment got stranded. in the isolated forest around Moloundou, Cameroon and running out of food.

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 worldwide.

“Some may say that understanding the past does not matter,” writes Pepin 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 from this infection. Second, this tragedy has been facilitated (if not caused) by human interventions: colonization, urbanizations and possibly well-intentioned public health campaigns.