Washington (AFP) - A new genetic history of HIV shows
how the pandemic almost certainly took root in the
1920s in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of
Congo, researchers said Thursday.
Assisted by train transport and the sex trade, the virus
that causes AIDS then spread across the continent and
eventually the world, infecting some 75 million people
and killing 36 million of them.

An international team of researchers reconstructed
the genetic history of the HIV-1 group M pandemic,
and found that the common ancestor of group M is
"highly likely" to have emerged in Kinshasa around
1920.
While various strains of human immunodeficiency
virus (HIV) have jumped from primates and apes to
humans at least 13 times, only one such transmission
event has led to a human pandemic.
And it did because it was aided by "a 'perfect storm' of
factors, including urban growth, strong railway links
during Belgian colonial rule, and changes to the sex
trade, combined to see HIV emerge from Kinshasa
and spread across the globe" between the 1920s and
1950s, said the study in the journal Science.
"For the first time we have analyzed all the available
evidence using the latest phylogeographic techniques,
which enable us to statistically estimate where a virus
comes from," said senior author Oliver Pybus of
Oxford University's Department of Zoology.
"This means we can say with a high degree of
certainty where and when the HIV pandemic
originated."
A key factor in the pandemic's spread was the use of
trains as transport, which helped bring the virus from
isolated pockets of people into the larger city, which
was Kinshasa, among the best connected of all central
African cities.
"Data from colonial archives tells us that by the end of
1940s over one million people were travelling through
Kinshasa on the railways each year," said Nuno Faria
of Oxford University's Department of Zoology, first
author of the paper.
Then, looking at genetic data, scientists could see that
HIV spread across what is now the Democratic
Republic of the Congo (formerly the Belgian Congo
and Zaire) to other major cities, by the early 1950s.
These regional hubs were connected to southern and
eastern African countries.
"We think it is likely that the social changes around the
independence in 1960 saw the virus 'break out' from
small groups of infected people to infect the wider
population and eventually the world," Faria said.
These social changes include sex workers who took on
a large number of clients, coupled with "public health
initiatives against other diseases that led to the unsafe
use of needles (which) may have contributed to
turning HIV into a full-blown epidemic," the study said.
Campaigns to treat people with sexually transmitted
diseases may have been carried out using needles
that were not sterile, suggesting another route for HIV
and co-infections with hepatitis C that are often seen
in men in the DRC over 50.
HIV was first identified in 1981, and the AIDS epidemic
ballooned for more than a decade until antiretroviral
drugs were created. These long-term regimens have
transformed HIV from a fatal disease into a chronic
condition for many of those infected.
Researchers said further study is needed to
understand the different social factors that enabled
the virus to spread the way it did.

Lies. The us created hiv and used africa as a testing ground. Just like ebola

Every sickness and always come from Africa, so America and Europe is paradise abi? Don't mind them jare.