The Origins of AIDS

Thirty years have passed since the discovery of AIDS, but its origins continue to puzzle doctors and scientists.

Today is World AIDS Day. Held on 1 December every year, it is an opportunity for people worldwide to unite in the fight against HIV, show their support for people living with HIV and to commemorate people who have died. World AIDS Day was the first ever global health day and the first one was held in 1988.

From an injured bush hunter (or cook) in about 1921, SIVcpz (chimpanzee SIV) made the leap to humans to become HIV -- a leap that likely happened on more than one occasion. However, this time the European colonial drive on equatorial Africa had created conditions for a "perfect storm." How this one case led to tens of millions is quite a story.

Inspired by his own experiences working as an infectious diseases physician in Africa, Jacques Pepin looks back to the early twentieth-century events in Africa that triggered the emergence of HIV/AIDS and traces its subsequent development into the most dramatic and destructive epidemic of modern times in The Origins of AIDS.

One amazon reviewer wrote:

This well written and fascinating book is a cogent attempt to reconstruct the process that generated the great HIV pandemic. The author is a Canadian infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist with considerable experience in HIV-related research, including a good deal of work in Africa. Based on a careful synthesis of research and his own archival investigations, Pepin presents a synthesis of molecular epidemiology, traditional epidemiology, and social history to explain the emergence of HIV. Pepin supports this model with careful arguments and analysis of the existing data. His integration of the colonial medical experience and the complex social history of central Africa with the epidemiology of HIV is impressive. The emergence of the HIV pandemic is presented as the result of the interaction between interesting biological phenomena, a serial cross-species jump of viruses, and the enormous social changes resulting from European colonialism. A good part of his model is based on inference but all is plausible and the whole hangs together particularly well. Well written and illustrated, this is actually gripping reading.

Pepin describes how the disease was first transmitted from chimpanzees to man. He shows how urbanization, prostitution, and large-scale colonial medical campaigns intended to eradicate tropical diseases combined to disastrous effect to fuel the spread of the virus from its origins in Léopoldville to the rest of Africa, the Caribbean and ultimately worldwide.

The author offers an essential new perspective on HIV/AIDS and on the lessons that must be learned if we are to avoid provoking another pandemic in the future. This book presents and develops an elegant hypothesis and is nicely documented. The theories are thoughtfully stated without finger-pointing or shame. Just brilliant! The Origin of AIDS is a must read for anyone who cares about humanity. Thank you, Jacques Pepin.