New book links HIV to colonialism - Health - Health Conditions & Diseases - Share.Dhangout.com
New book links HIV to colonialism
The global Aids epidemic can be seen as an outgrowth of European colonialism in Africa, argues a new book co-authored by a Washington Post journalist and an Aids researcher at Harvard University.
The strain of the human-immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that accounts for 99 per cent of Aids deaths “appeared to have spread from a single explosion, a big bang of the Aids epidemic” that originated in Cameroon about 100 years ago, the authors write. “Powering the big bang was the burgeoning trade of colonial Africa.”
Carried by porters who had been virtually enslaved by European colonisers, the virus slowly made its way to the Belgian colonial capital called Leopoldville, the book theorises. It describes that city, now known as Kinshasa, as “Ground Zero” of an epidemic that has gone on to claim about 25 million lives.
From Kinshasa — which is today the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo — one “subtype” of the er HIV strain travelled east toward Lake Victoria sometime in the 1960s, suggests Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the Aids Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It.
Another subtype went south to Zambia, Botswana and South Africa. And a third “hopped all the way across the ocean to Haiti, then to the United States and Europe,” write Post reporter Craig Timberg and Harvard epidemiologist Daniel Halperin.
Strong evidence shows that HIV first appeared in humans in southeastern Cameroon in either the closing decades of the 19th century or the first two decades of the 20th century, Timberg and Halperin say. They speculate that the transmission from simian to human occurred when “a hunter caught an infected chimpanzee for food, allowing the virus to pass from the chimp’s blood into the hunter’s body, probably through a cut during butchering.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment