The Origins of AIDS

by Jacques Pepin

• ISBN13: 9780521186377
• ISBN10: 0521186374
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-10-17
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

It is now thirty years since the discovery of AIDS but its origins continue to puzzle doctors and scientists. 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. He shows how the disease was first transmitted from chimpanzees to man and then 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. This is an essential new perspective on HIV/AIDS and on the lessons that must be learnt if we are to avoid provoking another pandemic in the future.

Author Biography

Jacques Pepin is Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at the Universit de Sherbrooke, Canada, where he is also Director of the Center for International Health. He has conducted research on infectious diseases in sixteen African countries.

Table of Contents

List of figures, maps and table	p. vii
Acknowledgements	p. ix
List of abbreviations	p. xi
Note on terminology	p. xiii
Map of Africa	p. xv
Introduction	p. 1
Out of Africa	p. 6
The source	p. 18
The timing	p. 32
The cut hunter	p. 43
Societies in transition	p. 59
The oldest trade	p. 84
Injections and the transmission of viruses	p. 103
The legacies of colonial medicine I: French Equatorial Africa and Cameroun	p. 118
The legacies of colonial medicine II: the Belgian Congo	p. 143
The other human immunodeficiency viruses	p. 168
From the Congo to the Caribbean	p. 180
The blood trade	p. 197
The globalisation	p. 209
Assembling the puzzle	p. 221
Epilogue: lessons learned	p. 235
References	p. 238
Appendix	p. 282
Index	p. 284
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