The Origins of AIDS

Description

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. Front Cover Frontmatter Title Page © Page Contents Figures, maps and table Acknowledgements Abbreviations Note on terminology Introduction 1 - Out of Africa 2 - The source 3 - The timing 4 - The cut hunter 5 - Societies in transition 6 - The oldest trade 7 - Injections and the transmission of viruses 8 - The legacies of colonial medicine I 9 - The legacies of colonial medicine II 10 - The other human immunodeficiency viruses 11 - From the Congo to the Caribbean 12 - The blood trade 13 - The globalisation 14 - Assembling the puzzle 15 - Epilogue References Appendix - Classification of retroviruses Index