The Washington Post has a great excerpt from the book Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It, by Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin. The book explores how the pressures of colonialism coupled with the steamship trade combined to create the perfect circumstances for HIV/AIDS to emerge as a pandemic.
There might even have been a series of infections at trading towns along the entire route downriver. Yet even within these riverside trading posts HIV would have struggled to create anything more than a short-lived, localized outbreak. Most of this colonial world didn’t have enough potential victims for such a fragile virus to start a major epidemic. HIV is harder to transmit than many other infections. People can have sex hundreds of times without passing the virus on. To spread widely, HIV requires a population large enough to sustain an outbreak and a sexual culture in which people often have more than one partner, creating networks of interaction that propel the virus onward.To fulfill its grim destiny, HIV needed a kind of place never before seen in Central Africa but one that now was rising in the heart of the region: a big, thriving, hectic place jammed with people and energy, where old rules were cast aside amid the tumult of new commerce.
It needed Kinshasa. It was here, hundreds of miles downriver from Cameroon, that HIV began to grow beyond a mere outbreak. It was here that AIDS grew into an epidemic.
Timberg and Halperin point out that the spread of HIV from the chimpanzee population that had HIV-1 group M to humans, then into an epidemic, had only a short window in which to occur. The chimps lived in a very remote part of Cameroon where the human population just wasn't large enough to sustain an epidemic, on the off-chance that cross-species infection occurred. In the whole history of the world, there were just 40 years where the circumstances were right.
It's weird to think that a man butchering a chimp sometime between 1880-1920 in a remote corner of Cameroon lead to the deaths of thousands of people almost a hundred years later. But no weirder, I guess, than believing an airline pilot fucked a monkey.
