(DM) – AIDS has claimed more than 33 million lives and its causative agent, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), has thus far proved impossible to find a vaccine for. Drugs that prevent transmission of the virus and squash symptoms are now readily available in many countries, but 1.7 million people became infected with HIV in 2019.
Professor Jacques Pepin, an epidemiologist at Université de Sherbrooke in Canada, has been trying to discover the origin of HIV for decades, since his time as a GP in Zaire (today the Democratic Republic of Congo) in the 1980s.
Previous studies found the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) in chimps first crossed over into humans in South-East Cameroon at the start of the 20th century. Simian immunodeficiency virus can be fatal to chimps and is exactly the same as HIV, the only difference between the two is the host it lives inside.
HIV is an example of zoonotic transmission, where a pathogen can cross from one species to another, like Covid-19, bird flu, and cowpox. In the acclaimed first edition of his book ‘Origin of AIDS’, published in 2011, Dr. Pepin concluded HIV likely infected a hunter in Cameroon at the start of the 20th century, before spreading to Léopoldville, now known as Kinshasa in the Congo. READ MORE
