European colonialism in Africa caused the HIV epidemic?

The movement of people to a new continent often leads to epidemics that kill a large number of indigenous people who have never developed the ability to immunity to strange diseases for them. But the arrival of Europeans in Africa a century ago is most likely a fire that triggers a pandemic that not only kills millions of indigenous people, but also makes the world suffer for decades. : HIV / AIDS epidemic.

That is the conclusion of a new book called Tinderbox: How the West Sparking the AIDS Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome it (The light box: The West has exploded the AIDS epidemic and the world will overcome it like that. ) by two authors, Craig Timberg and Danial Halperin. Timberg is a former reporter in Africa and is now a Washington Post journalist. Halperin is an advisor on HIV prevention in the US government's global AIDS program.

Considering much evidence, the authors suggest that European countries competing for Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned small epidemics into a world pandemic. Timberg and Halperin search for the HIV virus journey from chimpanzee to human in southeast Cameroon until widespread spread in the commercial capital Kinshasa. They stressed that when European powers seized Africa and Asia between the 1880s and 1920s, the HIV virus gradually spread through trade routes.

Excerpt from their book: 'We now know where the pandemic began: in an area in southeastern Cameroon . We know the time: in the few decades before and after 1900. We also know how it started: a hunter caught an infected chimp for food, allowing the virus to go from the blood of chimpanzees enter a hunter's body, possibly through a cut on the skin ".

It may have happened many times, in the earlier centuries when Africa had little contact with the outside world. But at the beginning of the 20th century, when trade began to grow, thousands of porters moved in the area creating the opportunity for a virus to spread to commodity exchange stations. One of the first victims - perhaps a hunter, a porter or an ivory looking - has spread HIV to his partner. After that, the virus broke out at the trading station before spreading down the Sangha River in other trading towns on the trade road. To spread, HIV requires a population large enough to sustain an outbreak and a sexual culture in which people have more than one sexual partner.

They explained to the Washington Post newspaper: 'It is clear that the colonial trade creates networks of sexual relations and causes the spread of disease. In the following decades, the use of hypodermic needles in health services may play an important role in the spread of HIV. "

A crowded place, many people move frequently, messy is a perfect environment to spread this deadly virus. They argue that without the African teardown of European countries, it is difficult for HIV to spread outside the southeastern country of Cameroon to kill tens of millions of people.

The World Health Organization estimates about 33 million people worldwide are infected with HIV. Viruses are especially common in African countries like South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique.