The African Aids Epidemic: A History

"I chose this book because it is a very thorough account of the devastation the HIV pandemic caused in Africa. Many accounts of HIV, particularly in the 1980s, tended to concentrate on the virus’s effects in the West, where it predominantly affected the gay population but meanwhile it was silently spreading through Africa, just as Iliffe describes. In fact, we now know that HIV first infected humans in Africa sometime before 1959 – the date of the first case that has been retrospectively identified. My book Virus Hunt is about the hunt for the origin of HIV, an amazing scientific detective story, in my opinion. Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, is the epicentre of the HIV pandemic from where all chains of infection began. It was recognised quite early on that HIV jumped from chimpanzees to humans, so the question was, how did it get to Kinshasa? “The hunt for the origin of HIV is an amazing scientific detective story” To answer this, scientists in the US and UK compared the genetic code of HIV with that of similar viruses found in African primates. Eventually, they found the virus most closely related to HIV in a single group of chimpanzees living in the southeast corner of Cameroon. So that’s where the virus transferred to humans. They postulate that the virus must have been transported down the local Sangar River, a branch of the Congo River, inside one or more infected people, all the way to Kinshasa. Given the chaos of Kinshasa at the time, it was an ideal place for the virus to thrive. It took off, spreading by heterosexual contact to cause an epidemic in the city and beyond before it had even been discovered. Then, in around 1966, one single person carried the virus from Kinshasa to Haiti, in the Caribbean. At the time, Haiti was a place where American gay people used to holiday. So the virus entered the gay population and travelled to the US and from there it spread globally. The fact that in Africa HIV is a heterosexual infection while in many western countries it remains mainly in the gay population and IV drug users is all down to chance. There is a lot that can be learnt from each pandemic and epidemic once the full facts are known. It will probably take years before we have unravelled the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, but it is important for future epidemic and pandemic prevention to know exactly which animal it came from, the nature of infection and spread in that animal species and, of course, how it jumped to humans. Only then can we hope to prevent another such disaster."