Researchers from Oxford University and Belgium claim in a study that they’ve found the exact origin of HIV/AIDS. They say the pandemic began during the 1920s via the “bustling trade routes and migrant workers” in Kinshasa, now the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Urban population, changes in sexual habits, and the handling of bush meat contributed to the pandemic of HIV/AIDS, according to the researchers.
Scientist call the origin a “perfect storm.” The virus spread so quickly that when it was finally discovered, it was too late to stop it. Researchers combined both genetic analysis and statistics to gain more knowledge of the specific strain that has since infected more than 75 million people. Some sources even claim that the Belgian Congo Independence movement may have expedited the spread of the disease.
“Data from colonial archives tells us that by the end of the 1940s over one million people were traveling through Kinshasa on the railways each year. Our genetic data tells us that HIV very quickly spread across Congo, a country the size of Western Europe,” Dr. Nuno Faria of Oxford said.
Although different simian viruses exist and 13 cases of transmission from chimpanzees, gorillas, and monkeys to humans have been documented, the scientists have been focusing on the strain reaching the masses globally — HIV-1 group M. By the 1960s, the epidemic tripled due to sex trafficking and use of contaminated needles in health initiatives. After more than 30 years, the constructed and strict analysis these researchers put in place to dissect the times and locations of HIV/AIDS is considered a breakthrough.
“Using statistical approaches applied to HIV-1 sequence data from central Africa, we show that from the 1920s Kinshasa (in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo) was the focus of early transmission and the source of pre-1960 pandemic viruses elsewhere,” said the Oxford University scientists in the study.
According to the United Nations, over 70 percent of the African population live with the disease, while globally, 1.5 million people succumbed to the disease.