The Origins of AIDS
Cambridge University Press
Edition: 2, 1/21/2021
EAN 9781108720397, ISBN10: 1108720390
Paperback, 394 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
It is now forty years since the discovery of AIDS, but its origins continue to puzzle doctors, scientists and patients. Inspired by his own experiences working as a physician in a bush hospital in Zaire, Jacques Pépin looks back to the early twentieth-century events in central Africa that triggered the emergence of HIV/AIDS and traces its subsequent development into the most dramatic and destructive epidemic of modern times. He shows how the disease was first transmitted from chimpanzees to man and then how military campaigns, urbanisation, prostitution and large-scale colonial medical interventions intended to eradicate tropical diseases combined to disastrous effect to fuel the spread of the virus from its origins in Léopoldville to the rest of Africa, the Caribbean and ultimately worldwide. This is an essential perspective on HIV/AIDS and on the lessons that must be learned as the world faces another pandemic.
Introduction
1. Out of Africa
2. The Source
3. The Timing
4. The Cut Hunter
5. The Scramble for Central Africa
6. Tropical Boom Towns
7. The Oldest Profession
8. Injections and the Transmission of Viruses
9. The Legacies of French Colonial Medicine
10. The Legacies of Belgian Tropical Medicine
11. The Other Human Immunodeficiency Viruses
12. From the Congo to the Caribbean
13. The Blood Trade
14. A Long Journey
15. Globalisation
16. A False Villain, a Genuine Hero
17. Epilogue