AIDS probably passed from chimpanzees to humans because of a hungry 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 soldiers who, along with 4,000 African auxiliaries, traveled from Leopoldville, in the Belgian Congo, to an outpost in Cameroon, says Canadian microbiologist Jacques Pepin, who he already worked as a bush doctor in central Africa in the 1980s.
Pepin, professor in the Department of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at the Universite de Sherbrooke in Quebec, makes the intriguing hypothesis the focus 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, Pepin writes in the tome recently published by Cambridge University Journal.
In a 2011 edition of the seminal book, Pepin originally postulated that HIV passed from chimpanzees to humans after an injured African hunter killed one of the beasts in 1921 and was infected in the process. Pepin then recounts how the spread of the virus was fueled worldwide by colonization, prostitution and “well-intentioned” public health campaigns that lacked what are now common security protocols, such as preventing needle sharing.
In the second edition, released this month, Pepin draws on research in medical archives in Africa and Europe, suggesting that ‘Patient Zero’ was not a native hunter, but a hungry World War I soldier forced to hunt chimpanzees in search of food when his regiment got stuck in the remote forest around Moloundou, Cameroon and ran out of food supplies.
Most AIDS books began 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 and infected almost 76 million people worldwide.
“Some may say that understanding the past is irrelevant,” 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 are going to die, because of this infection. Second, this tragedy was facilitated (or even caused) by human interventions: colonization, urbanization and probably well-intentioned public health campaigns. “