Canadian traces origin of AIDS to starving First World War soldier who hunted chimpanzees

[Bootes Void]

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/canadian-traces-origin-of-aids-to-starving-first-world-war-soldier-who-hunted-chimpanzees

A Canadian professor who has been studying the origin of HIV for decades says he has identified a new “Patient Zero” — a starving First World War soldier stationed in Cameroon who was forced to hunt apes to survive.

In the first edition of his book Origin of Aids, Jacques Pepin, a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, originally traced the first case of the human immunodeficiency virus to a hunter in Southeast Cameroon at the start of the 20th Century.

In his book published in 2011, he described how the simian immunodeficiency virus in chimps crossed into humans and became the virus that causes AIDS when a native hunter likely got infected via a cut. However, in a new edition of his famed book, Pepin has revised his “cut hunter” hypothesis to focus on a “cut soldier.”

“During World War One, Germany had a number of colonies in Africa and the Allied forces decided to invade these colonies, one of which was Cameroon,” Pepin told the U.K.’s Daily Mail.

“Cameroon was invaded by a combination of British, Belgian and French soldiers from five directions

“My hypothesis is that one of the soldiers got infected while hunting in the forest. A chimpanzee was killed and when cutting the animal to bring it back, there was an injury which got infected with the virus. Eventually, the soldier, after the war, came back all the way to Léopoldville and probably started the very first train of transmission in Léopoldville itself.”

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The Daily Mail reports that Pepin estimated that HIV initially spread slowly in the city, primarily due to hospitals reusing dirty needles because of shortages, with only about 500 infections by the early 1950s.

However, in the 1960s, the population of Léopoldville grew rapidly, the sex trade boomed, and the virus thrived.

“Every year prostitutes would have up to 1,500 clients. That was perfect for the sexual amplification of HIV between these high-volume sex workers and their clients,” Pepin said.

The virus eventually spread to Haiti, and from there was exported to the United States, and eventually to Western Europe, Pepin told the Daily Mail.

Maybe People might have known this but this is the likely theory

[Tender Branson]

Moral of the story:

If we Austrians didn’t start WW1, there would probably have been no HIV/Aids (or maybe it would have originated later).

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Moral of the story:

If we Austrians didn’t start WW1, there would probably have been no HIV/Aids (or maybe it would have originated later).

You Austrians need to get rid of the letter H.

First, it was Habsburgs, then Hitler, and now HIV.

[Never Made it to Graceland]

Moral of the story:

If we Austrians didn’t start WW1, there would probably have been no HIV/Aids (or maybe it would have originated later).

You Austrians need to get rid of the letter H.

First, it was Habsburgs, then Hitler, and now HIV.

Not to mention Haider.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Moral of the story:

If we Austrians didn’t start WW1, there would probably have been no HIV/Aids (or maybe it would have originated later).

You Austrians need to get rid of the letter H.

First, it was Habsburgs, then Hitler, and now HIV.

Not to mention Haider.

I didn't. 😸

[Lechasseur]

Moral of the story:

If we Austrians didn’t start WW1, there would probably have been no HIV/Aids (or maybe it would have originated later).

You Austrians need to get rid of the letter H.

First, it was Habsburgs, then Hitler, and now HIV.

The Habsburgs are FFs

[Wikipedia delenda est]

Moral of the story:

If we Austrians didn’t start WW1, there would probably have been no HIV/Aids (or maybe it would have originated later).

You Austrians need to get rid of the letter H.

First, it was Habsburgs, then Hitler, and now HIV.

The Habsburgs are FFs

No, Bourbons all the way.

[Progressive Pessimist]

I guess that absolves the guy who allegedly f***ed a Chimp of his guilt.

[vitoNova]

So is that gay French-Canadian flight attendant off the hook now?

[Santander]

So is that gay French-Canadian flight attendant off the hook now?

Um, he was a super spreader. Nobody ever said he was patient zero.

[vitoNova]

So is that gay French-Canadian flight attendant off the hook now?

Um, he was a super spreader. Nobody ever said he was patient zero.

Not really.  The media and books which documented the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the 1980s always referred to him as "Patient Zero."

Whether it was factually correct or not.    "Super-spreader" was not in the lexicon yet, so they just went with Patient Zero.  Despite its inaccuracy. 

[brucejoel99]

Certainly more plausible than the "Africans had sex with chimps" theory that some people still believe.

[Del Tachi]

Maybe I'm missing something...but what his reasoning it was a World War I soldier specifically other than they just happened to be in the general area at the time? 

Is there a specific account of what Pepin is hypothesizing?  or is it just the 21st century "White colonizer must always be pure evil" trope imparted onto epidemiology?  lol

[7,052,770]

So is that gay French-Canadian flight attendant off the hook now?

Pretty much, but not just because of this. He has been for a while now.

Yes, he super irresponsible, don't get me wrong, but his impact on the early AIDS scene has been greatly overstated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ga%C3%ABtan_Dugas#Re-examination

[brucejoel99]

Maybe I'm missing something...but what his reasoning it was a World War I soldier specifically other than they just happened to be in the general area at the time?  

Is there a specific account of what Pepin is hypothesizing?  or is it just the 21st century "White colonizer must always be pure evil" trope imparted onto epidemiology?  lol

It's just his hypothesis, & there's no actual hard data to corroborate it. In any event, though, certainly wouldn't go as far as the bolded, because there's an actual method to the madness beyond "hrr drr evil colonizer bad" given what does exist: specifically, genetic studies & viral mutation rate estimates which imply that the crossover to humans occurred in the early-20th century, with it not having spread quickly early on (which was already clear, since it took 'til 1959 for what has since been confirmed to be the earliest identified case to occur, & 'til at least 1980 - by which point, it had obviously managed to already spread out to much of the world - for it to be recognized as a potential pandemic strain that we should actually start looking for).

Thus, what he focused on was the question of why it wasn't spreading quickly early on, & that's a relatively simple aspect to infer here: because HIV requires an actual transfer of bodily fluids to spread, it may have been kept isolated to a small geographic area or even a small community, with it only starting to thrive in an environment via which it could spread once these communities were vastly changed as a result of, say, the Congo's industrialization leading to more people in the area engaging in sex work & more individuals traveling across far distances both to & from the area. He then linked this postulation to potential candidates for not just the 1st exposure, but the 1st exposure that was then introduced from the jungle to Léopoldville, & a soldier in Africa ~circa WWI is as good a candidate for the 1st person to be infected as any since the general consensus was already that it emerged in the early-20th century.

The issue is that trying to pin it down to a single event is like finding a needle in a haystack, so of course, the exact moment of the animal-to-human jump could've just as plausibly arisen out of workers in the bushmeat industry butchering apes, coming into contact with a lot of ape blood in a job that involves a lot of cuts & scrapes, & then visiting sex workers in the city every once in a while. That's certainly not a new theory. What he's merely offering here is just a new hypothesis as to the precise when & how it may have occurred: that is, a soldier traveling from a duty station in the jungle to a duty station in the city potentially being as plausible as (if not more plausible than) a rural bushmeat hunter traveling to the city every once in a while.

And of course, he made sure to make clear in the book of his in which he published his hypothesis that it's just that - a hypothesis - & that nothing has been traced & that there's certainly nothing concrete which has been arrived at in terms of the virus' origins, even going so far as to include a lot of "possibly," "may have," & "conceivably" statements for good effect, only to see publications such as this print super misleading titles (e.g., "Canadian traces origin of AIDS to starving First World War soldier who hunted chimpanzees") anyway, i.e. the kind of sh*t that helps to give journalism a bad rep.

[Obama-Biden Democrat]

So is that gay French-Canadian flight attendant off the hook now?

Um, he was a super spreader. Nobody ever said he was patient zero.

He was like Typhoid Mary and Trump.