There Is A New Version Of The Origin Of AIDS

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Video: There Is A New Version Of The Origin Of AIDS

Video: There Is A New Version Of The Origin Of AIDS
Video: Virology Lectures 2016 #24: HIV and AIDS 2024, March
There Is A New Version Of The Origin Of AIDS
There Is A New Version Of The Origin Of AIDS
Anonim

Professor Jacques Pepin of the University of Canada has been studying the origins and spread of the virus that causes the deadly AIDS disease for several decades. He now believes he has practically figured out who Patient Zero was

A new version of the origin of AIDS has appeared - AIDS, HIV, virus, Congo, chimpanzee, epidemic, disease
A new version of the origin of AIDS has appeared - AIDS, HIV, virus, Congo, chimpanzee, epidemic, disease

Theories about where it came from human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)fatal disease AIDS, which has already claimed at least 33 million lives, there is a huge variety: From artificial creation in the laboratory as a biological weapon, to the "virus bomb" thrown to humanity by aliens (where can we go without aliens).

Due to the fact that HIV was first detected in homosexuals, it was initially considered only a specific infection of anal sex lovers. Then drug addicts and prostitutes began to fall ill with them. And nowadays, many people consider AIDS a disease of the marginalized, to which they do not classify themselves and therefore mistakenly reduce the risk of infection to a minimum.

Several years ago, it was revealed that African chimpanzees suffer from a virus very similar to HIV, and for them it is not as dangerous a disease as for humans. Because of this, a string of new hypotheses arose about the transmission of the simian virus to humans and its mutation to turn into HIV.

For example, some researchers have argued in all seriousness that Africans contracted HIV through sexual intercourse with wild chimpanzees. There were also versions with infection after eating monkey meat.

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Professor's book was recently published Jacques Pepina "The Origins of AIDS", in which he proves that he figured out the very first person who contracted HIV from chimpanzees and then passed it on to many other people.

Pepin works as an epidemiologist at the University of Sherbrooke (Canada) and has been trying for decades to identify the scenario of the origin of HIV and the route of infection. In the 1980s, he worked as a therapist in Zaire (now the Congo), just in the years when HIV was first detected in African homosexuals.

He was among those scientists who discovered that HIV is unusually similar to the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) and that the first cases of human infection with a similar disease began in the early twentieth century in Southeast Cameroon.

It turned out that such viruses belong to the so-called zoonoses (zoonotic transmission), that is, they are very easily transmitted from one species to another animal. To the same zoonoses, by the way, scientists include cowpox, avian groups and the notorious Covid-19.

For the first time, Pepin expressed his theory of the transition of the monkey virus to humans in the first edition of The Origin of AIDS, released in 2011, but recently a more detailed and revised version was released.

In it, he proves that it was a hungry hunter from Cameroon during the First World War that was to blame. At some point, the hunter killed a chimpanzee infected with SIV and then his companions ate this meat, becoming the first infected. When they returned to the big city, they spread the infection throughout the area.

In the human body, the virus began to adapt and take root, turning into HIV, and taking into account African hygiene, which even today shocks unusual people, the infected gradually became more and more.

From infected hunters, the disease spread to the city of Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) in the Congo and began to spread like a flu epidemic, but due to the fact that no one knew anything about the new infection, HIV deaths were attributed to other diseases.

Kinshasa (Congo)

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Pepin assures that he accurately figured out this hunter, who became "Patient Zero" and that it was not just a local resident, but one of the soldiers who, together with his group, got stuck in the remote forest of the Molundu district in 1916. When the soldiers' supplies ran out, from hunger, they began to hunt primates, including chimpanzees.

“During World War I, Germany had several colonies in Africa, and the Allied forces decided to invade these colonies, one of which was Cameroon. Cameroon was captured by British, Belgian and French soldiers from five directions.

On one invasion route, 1,600 soldiers left Leopoldville up the Congo River and its tributary, the Sanger River, before reaching their final destination in Cameroon on foot.

This journey took them to a remote town in Molundu, a site that previous studies had suggested was the site of the very first outbreak of HIV infection. The soldiers spent three or four months in Molunda before moving forward. When they were there, the main problem for them was not the bullets of the enemy, but hunger, says Professor Pepin.

The normal population of the entire southeastern region of Cameroon in the 1920s was about 4,000, living off cassava, other crops, and bushmeat. These people fled when the soldiers arrived, due to their brutal reputation as murderers of cities and ruthless rape of women.

As a result, the soldiers soon ran out of food and relied on supplies sent by the river from Brazzaville and Leopoldville. However, the river reached only one point and then porters - low-paid local residents, had to carry food, wine, ammunition and weapons to Molunda by hand.

However, only about half of the supplies reached the soldiers, as the carriers themselves were severely exhausted by torture and mistreatment. And when the delivered food ran out, 1600 soldiers with guns rushed into the jungle to shoot any edible living creatures.

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According to Pepin, when the soldiers ate the infected chimpanzee meat and returned to Leopoldville some time later, they brought a deadly virus to the capital of the Belgian colony. Within a few decades, there were about 500 people living with HIV in Leopoldville. And that was just the beginning.

Dirt and poorly cleaned hospital equipment, especially syringe needles, and a lack of disinfectants have contributed to the spread of HIV.

And when, in the 1960s, Congo finally threw off the shackles of European colonialism, a huge influx of refugees and migrants from other cities and towns began to Leopoldville. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the population of Leopoldville was only 14 thousand people. Now it (the current name of Kinshasa) is home to 14 million.

When migrants and refugees poured into the city, it turned out that there are 10 men for every woman. After all, those who fled were mostly men. This led to a strong development of prostitution, including homosexual. And no condoms. An ideal environment for the spread of HIV.

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