Ruminations: The Origins of HUMAN IMMUNODEFICIENCY VIRUS

"During World War I, Germany had a number of colonies in Africa and the Allied forces decided to invade these colonies, one of which was Cameroon."
"Cameroon was invaded by a combination of British, Belgian and French soldiers from five directions. The soldiers spent three or four months in Moloundou before moving forward. When they were there, the main problem was not bullets from the enemy, but starvation."
"All of a sudden, you have 1,600 soldiers with rifles and plenty of ammunition, so the level of hunting in that area went up dramatically over these few months [in 1916].
"My hypothesis is that one of the soldiers got infected while hunting in the forest. A chimpanzee was killed and when cutting the animal to bring it back, there was an injury which got infected with the virus."
"Eventually the soldier, after the war, came back all the way to Leopoldville and probably started the very first train of transmission in Leopoldville itself."
Jacques Pepin, professor, Department of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, University of Sherbrooke, Quebec

Professor Jacques Pepin says soldiers would have hunted chimps (Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto)

AIDS has been responsible for the death of over 32 million people globally. No vaccine has yet been developed for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Treatments are available that have the effect of reducing the severity of symptoms and to prevent transmission of the virus. Despite which in 2019 alone, 1.7 million people became infected with HIV. In that same year 38 million people globally were living with the virus, which has over time infected over 75 million worldwide since the epidemic began, according to UN AIDS.

Now, Professor Pepin who in 2011 published a book where he described the manner in which simian immunodeficiency virus occurring in chimpanzees crossed he species barrier to humans, causing AIDS. At that time he theorized that a native hunter in all likelihood was vulnerable to infection through a cut he had sustained and thus became the first person to have become infected with HIV. The professor has since, however, rethought his hypothesis and has arrived at a similar conclusion with a different scenario.

In publishing a new edition of his well-recognized book, Professor Pepin has set aside the "cut hunter" for what he considers to be a more likely event that relates to a "cut soldier". And as he now tells it, Patient Zero was one among 1,600 Belgian and French soldiers who had been dispatched to travel up the Congo River from Leopoldville capital of the Belgian colony (now Kinshasa, Congo), to arrive at Moloundou, a remote outpost in Cameroon. It is interesting to note that studies had previously identified the town as the probable site of the first infection of HIV.

The indigenous people located there were known to live off casava root along with other crops and bushmeat. The soldiers relied on food supplied to them from Leopoldville and Brazzaville, ferried up the Congo River, then carried overland up to 25 miles by foot through the local people. The problem was insufficient supplies reaching the soldiers who began suffering from malnutrition, some of whom died of starvation, convincing those left that their salvation lay in hunting for themselves.

Chimpanzees in the jungle of southern Liberia. Photo by ZOOM DOSSO/AFP/Getty Images

HIV spread gradually when the soldiers on the conclusion of the war returned to Leopoldville. The spread of the disease was doubtless hastened by hospitals making re-use of needles previously used, in reflection of medical equipment shortages. By the early 1950s an estimated 500 infections resulted. A decade on, the population of the city grew rapidly and as it did, the sex trade boomed and the virus took full advantage.

"Every year prostitutes would have up to 1,500 clients. That was perfect for the sexual amplification of HIV between these high-volume sex workers and their clients", explained Professor Pepin.

Eventually, the virus spread to Haiti, then was exported to the United States, in time spreading onward to Western Europe. And the history of the scourge of human immunodefiency virus shook the global community with the onset of a vicious deadly disease first identified among the gay populations of the world, but did not remain confined to gays, rapidly spreading within heterosexual communities where millions became infected and died slow, painful, gruesome, unstoppable deaths.