HIV/AIDS Origin Traced to 1920s Congo City and Growing Sex Trade
A team of scientists has traced the spread of AIDS and the HIV virus to the city of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1920s. Its report states that a growing sex trade, along with rapid population growth and unsterilized needles used in health clinics facilitated the spread of the deadly virus.
Published in Science Magazine, the report describes that the HIV virus originated in chimpanzees in the early 20th century and spread to humans, likely because central African hunters ate infected meat. This occurred on a number of occasions, which placed into circulation different HIV viruses, including the HIV-1, which would go on to infect millions of people around the world.
A BBC News summary of the report states that scientists traced the source of the spread of HIV to the city of Kinshasa in 1920s, then part of Belgian Congo, which was undergoing rapid population growth at the time.
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"It was a very large and very rapidly growing area and colonial medical records show there was a high incidence of various sexually transmitted diseases," said professor Oliver Pybus, an evolutionary biologist and infectious disease specialist at the University of Oxford.
With the construction of railways, a large number of male workers were drawn to the city, which distorted the gender balance and lead to men outnumbering women two to one. This eventually led to a large sex trade.
"Public health campaigns to treat people for various infectious diseases with injections seem a plausible route [for spreading the virus]," Pybus speculated.
"The second really interesting aspect is the transport networks that enabled people to move round a huge country," he added.
Professor Jonathan Ball, from the University of Nottingham, added: "It's a fascinating insight into the early phases of the HIV-1 pandemic.
"It's the usual suspects that are most likely to have helped the virus get a foothold in humans — travel, population increases and human practices such as unsafe healthcare interventions and prostitution."
National Geographic pointed out that the research team analyzed HIV genomes gathered over the past 30 years from 814 people in central Africa before arriving to its findings. The team compared full sets of DNA to reconstruct a tree of viral evolution and trace HIV's per-epidemic history.
The scientists also identified a "crucial mid-century moment of divergence" in the 1960s, where the O and M HIV groups took different courses, with the M group exploding and spreading throughout the world. Congo's rapidly growing colonial transportation system helped with this spread.
"Riding the roads, waters, and railways between Congo's cities were millions of wage laborers. Most were men; sex work flourished. Group M viruses hitched rides, traveling from the commercial hub of Kinshasa to ports at the Congo River's mouth and cities in the region's far reaches," the National Geographic article reads.
"The viruses' spread to other continents was only a matter of time. It's thought that they were carried to Haiti in the early 1960s by workers returning home."
