AIDS has claimed more than 33 million lives and so far its causative agent, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), has made it impossible to detect a vaccine.
Drugs that prevent the spread of the virus and squash symptoms are now available in many countries, but 1.7 million people contracted HIV in 2019.
Professor Jacques Pepin, an epidemiologist at Université de Sherbrooke in Canada, has been trying to trace the origin of HIV for decades, from his time as a GP in Zaire (Democratic Republic of Congo today) in the 1980s.
Previous studies have found that the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) in chimps was transmitted to humans in Southeast Cameroon in the early 20th century.
Simian immunodeficiency virus can be fatal to chimps and is just like HIV, the only difference between the two is the host it stays indoors.
HIV is an example of zoonotic transmission, where a pathogen can pass from one species to another, such as Covid-19, avian flu and smallpox.
In the first famous edition of his book ‘Origin of AIDS’, published in 2011, Dr. Pepin concluded that HIV had killed the hunter in Cameroon in the early 20th century, before it spread to Léopoldville, now called Kinshasa in the Congo.
Now, a revised version of this ‘cut hunter’ concept has been published which states that the original ‘Patient Zero’ was not a native hunter, but instead had to be a hungry soldier. World War I hunting chimps for food while trapped in the remote forest around Moloundou, Cameroon in 1916 – leading to the ‘cut soldier’ theory.
In an exclusive interview with MailOnline, Dr. Pepin explains how colonialism, hunger and prostitution helped to shape the epidemic of AIDS.
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Dr Jacques Pepin believes that a World War I hungry soldier forced him to hunt chimps for food when he was trapped in the remote forest around Moloundou, Cameroon in 1916 – the ‘cut soldier’ theory . Eventually, the soldier, after the war, returned all the way to Léopoldville and may have started the first deployment train in Léopoldville itself. From here, the virus spread and was eventually sent to the USA, where it later became global.
In an exclusive interview with MailOnline, Professor Pepin explains how colonialism, hunger and prostitution helped shape the spread of AIDS.
‘During the First World War, Germany had several colonies in Africa and Allied forces decided to invade these colonies, and Cameroon was one of them,’ said Dr Pepin.
Cameroon was attacked by a mixture of British, Belgian and French soldiers from five directions. ‘
On one of the offensive routes 1,600 troops entered from Léopoldville up the Congo River and the tributary of the Sanger River before reaching their final destination in Cameroon on foot.
This path took them to the remote city of Moloundou, where their previous studies had examined the site of the first HIV infection.
The soldiers spent three or four months in Moloundou before moving on. Once there, the main problem was not bullets from the enemy, but hunger, ‘said Dr Pepin.
The average population in the Southeast Cameroon region in the 1920s was around 4,000, living off cassava, other crops and bush meat.
These people fled when the soldiers arrived because of their brutal reputation for killing cities and violently attacking women.
As a result, the soldiers soon ran out of food and relied on supplies sent by river from Brazzaville and Léopoldville.
However, the river has not hitherto gone and ‘carriers’, poorly paid locals, were hired to transport food, wine, bullets and weapons by hand to Moloundou.
As a result of daily walks of up to 25 miles with a 25kg (55lbs) payload and adequate nutrition, half of those souls died, Dr Pepin estimates.
The supply issues caused the great hunger and forced soldiers into the woods to hunt for any edible animal.
Suddenly you have 1,600 soldiers with enough rifles and ammunition, so the level of shooting in that area has gone up dramatically in recent months, ‘he told MailOnline.
‘My guess is that one of the soldiers caught him while hunting in the woods. A chimpanzee was killed and while cutting the animal to recapture it, there were injuries that caught the virus.
‘Eventually, the soldier, after the war, returned all the way to Léopoldville and may have started the first deployment train in Léopoldville itself.’
Dr Pepin believes that once the human population contracted this virus, it initially spread slowly, limited to what was then the capital of the Belgian colony at the time. .
It is estimated that this same case of zoonotic outbreak in 1916 led to about 500 infected people in the early 1950s.
HIV transmission at this stage was largely driven by the reuse of dirty needles in hospitals, the result of resource scarcity and limited disinfection capabilities.
In 1960, the Congo lost the shackles of European colonialism, bringing large numbers of refugees and immigrants to the city.
The population of Léopoldville was around 14,000 at the beginning of the 20th century and now Kinshasa, the name given to Léopoldville in 1966, is home to 14 million people – an increase of 1,000 times in a century.
However, the new city proved the perfect breeding ground for HIV as it created a lopsided sex divide, with ten males living in it for every female.
This led to great poverty and prostitution, which helped spread the sexually transmitted virus among the city’s population.
‘Every year prostitutes would have up to 1,500 clients. That was perfect for the sexual spread of HIV between these high-sex workers and their clients, ‘said Dr Pepin.
‘That’s when sexual transmission was accelerated in the 1960s.’
Central Leopoldville has been instrumental in the global spread of HIV, Dr. Pepin says, saying that before the 1960s a handful of cases were seen in other parts of the Belgian Congo.
A Haitian technical assistant who came to the country after the country’s independence caught the virus in this region, and eventually brought it home where it then spread among gay men.
‘Within a few years it was again sent to the US and in the US it spread among gay men and IV drug users and from the US it went to western Europe,’ says Dr. Pepin says.
Dr Jacques Pepin’s book ‘The Origins of AIDS’, published by Cambridge University Press, is now available for £ 19.99 RRP.