It is now thirty years since the discovery of AIDS but its origins continue to puzzle doctors and scientists. Inspired by his own experiences working as an infectious diseases physician in Africa, Jacques Pepin looks back to the early twentieth-century events in 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 urbanization, prostitution, and large-scale colonial medical campaigns 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 new perspective on HIV/AIDS and on the lessons that must be learnt if we are to avoid provoking another pandemic in the future.
Author(s): Jacques Pepin
Edition: 1
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2011
Language: English
Commentary: dcisneros
Pages: 310
Front Cover
Frontmatter
Title Page
© Page
Contents
Figures, maps and table
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Note on terminology
Introduction
1 - Out of Africa
2 - The source
3 - The timing
4 - The cut hunter
5 - Societies in transition
6 - The oldest trade
7 - Injections and the transmission of viruses
8 - The legacies of colonial medicine I
9 - The legacies of colonial medicine II
10 - The other human immunodeficiency viruses
11 - From the Congo to the Caribbean
12 - The blood trade
13 - The globalisation
14 - Assembling the puzzle
15 - Epilogue
References
Appendix - Classification of retroviruses
Index
