The first HIV infection was a soldier infected with the virus while hunting chimpanzees in World War I.

AIDS has killed more than 33 million people, and its causative agent, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), has so far proved impossible to find a vaccine.

Drugs to prevent viral infections and pumpkin symptoms are now readily available in many countries, but in 2019 1.7 million people were infected with HIV.

Professor Jack Pepin, Epidemiologist at Sherbrooke University CanadaHas been trying to discover the origin of HIV for decades since serving as GP in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in the 1980s.

Previous studies have found that the chimpanzee simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) first infected humans in southeastern Cameroon at the beginning of the 20th century.

The simian immunodeficiency virus is deadly to chimpanzees and is exactly the same as HIV, but the only difference between the two is the host in which the chimpanzee lives.

HIV is an example of zoonotic disease, where pathogens such as Covid-19, bird flu, and cowpox can be transmitted from one species to another.

In the acclaimed first edition of his book, Origin of AIDS, published in 2011, Dr. Pepin said that HIV may have infected a Cameroonian hunter in the early 20th century, and then Leopoldville, known as Kinshasa in Congo. I concluded that it would spread to.

A revised version of this “cut hunter” hypothesis is now open to the public, with the original “zero patient” not a native hunter, but a hungry World War I soldier in a remote forest surrounding him. When he was stuck, he was forced to hunt chimpanzees for food. In 1916 he created the Moloundou- “Cut Soldier” theory in Cameroon.

In an exclusive interview with MailOnline, Professor Pepin reveals how colonialism, hunger, and prostitution helped drive the ongoing AIDS epidemic.

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“During World War I, Germany had many colonies in Africa, and the Allies decided to invade these colonies, one of which was Cameroon,” Pepin said. Said the professor.

“Cameroon was invaded by a combination of British, Belgian and French soldiers from five directions.”

On one of the invasion routes, 1,600 soldiers walked from Leopoldville up the Congo River and its tributary, the Sanger River, to their final destination in Cameroon.

This road took them to the remote town of Morundu. The location estimated by previous studies was the location of the first HIV infection.

“The soldiers spent three or four months in Morundu before moving forward. When they were there, the main problem was hunger, not bullets from the enemy,” said Professor Pepin.

The normal population of the entire southeastern region of Cameroon in the 1920s was about 4,000 and lived in cassava, other crops and bushmeat.

These people fled when soldiers arrived because of their brutal reputation for slaughtering the town and mercilessly raping women.

As a result, the soldiers quickly ran out of food and relied on supplies sent from the river from Brazzaville and Leopoldville.

However, the river only flows this far, and low-wage locals, the “owners,” have been hired to manually bring food, wine, ammunition, and weapons to Morundu.

Professor Pepin estimates that daily trekking up to 25 miles carrying a payload of 25 kg (55 lbs) and inadequate nutrition killed half of these souls.

Logistics problems led to mass hunger, and soldiers set foot in the forest in search of edible animals.

“Suddenly, with 1,600 soldiers with rifles and lots of ammunition, the level of hunting in the area has risen dramatically in recent months,” he told MailOnline.

“My hypothesis is that one of the soldiers was infected while hunting in the woods. A chimpanzee was killed, an animal was cut out and brought back, and he was injured and infected with the virus.

“In the end, the soldiers returned all the way to Leopoldville after the war and probably started the first contagious train in Leopoldville itself.”

Professor Pepin believes that when the virus built this foothold in the population, it initially spread slowly and was confined to what was then the capital of the Belgian colony.

He estimates that this one case of zoonosis in 1916 led to about 500 infected people in the early 1950s.

The HIV epidemic at this point was primarily caused by the reuse of dirty needles in hospitals. This is a result of resource depletion and limited disinfection capacity.

In 1960, Congo lifted the bindings of European colonialism and caused an influx of refugees and migrants into cities.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Leopoldville had a population of about 14,000, but now Kinshasa, the name given to Leopoldville in 1966, is home to 14 million people, a 1,000-fold increase in the first century. ..

However, the newly named city proved to be the perfect breeding ground for HIV, as it caused a biased gender division in which 10 men lived per woman.

This led to poverty and prostitution and helped spread the sexually transmitted virus to city dwellers.

“Every year, prostitutes have up to 1,500 customers, which was great for sexually amplifying HIV between these large numbers of sex workers and their clients,” says Professor Pepin.

“That was when sexual communication really accelerated in the 1960s.”

The Leopoldville hub was essential to the global epidemic of HIV, Professor Pepin added, adding that by the 1960s, a small number of cases had been seen in other parts of the former Belgian Congo.

A Haitian technical assistant who came to the country after the country’s independence caught the virus in the area and eventually took it home and spread it to gay men.

“Within a few years it was re-exported to the United States, where it spread among gay men and IV drug users and went from the United States to Western Europe,” says Dr. Pepin.

Dr. Jack Pepin’s book The Origin of AIDS, published by the University of Cambridge Press, is now available for £ 19.99 RRP.