AIDS probably made the leap from chimpanzees to humans because of a famous World War I soldier who was forced to hunt animals for food, according to a new book.
The unknown “Patient Zero” was part of an invasion force of 1,600 Belgian and French troops who, along with 4,000 African aides, had traveled from Leopoldville in the Belgian Congo to a remote outpost in Cameroon, according to the 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, turns the intriguing hypothesis into the focus of a new edition of his famous book, “Origins of AIDS.”
Probably “Patient Zero” was injured after killing a subspecies of chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) infected with a monkey virus that was a precursor to HIV or human immunodeficiency virus, the virus that causes AIDS, Pepin writes in tom recently published by Cambridge University Press.
In a 2011 seminal book edition, Pepin originally argued that HIV jumped from chimpanzees to humans after a wounded African hunter killed one of the beasts in 1921, becoming infected in the process. Pepin goes on to explain how the spread of the virus was fueled worldwide by colonization, prostitution, and “well-intentioned” public health campaigns that did not have the usual security protocols, such as banning the sharing of needles.
In the second edition, published this month, Pepin is based on research in medical archives in Africa and Europe that suggests that “Patient Zero” was not a native hunter, but that a hungry World War I soldier forced hunting chimpanzees for food when his regiment was trapped in the remote forest around Moloundou, Cameroon and ran out of food supplies.
Most books on AIDS begin in 1981, when a group of gay men in the U.S. began dying after contracting virulent pneumonia. Since then, HIV has killed 33 million and infected about 76 million people worldwide.
“Some may 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 as a result of this infection. Second, this tragedy was facilitated (or even provoked) by human interventions: colonization, urbanization, and probably well-intentioned public health campaigns. ”