Find the cradle of HIV / AIDS pandemic

HIV was born in a "perfect storm" of many elements in Central Africa in the 1920s, according to a new study.

British and Belgian scientists analyzed the genetic history of the HIV virus and traced the start of a century disease in Kinshasa, now the capital of the Republic of Congo.

In the 1920s, Belgian colonial rulers transformed the city of Kinshasa into a thriving commercial center with modern railroad tracks, allowing the HIV virus to travel thousands of kilometers. This fact plus urban development, migrant workers and changes in sexual habits as well as prostitution, constitute "a perfect storm" , allowing the virus to spread. undetected, until it was too wanted to stop it.

According to research reports, experts combined genetic analysis with statistical data on calendar elements, such as how the population in Central Africa was distributed at that time. They focused on HIV-1 in the M group, one of many strains of HIV transmitted from primates to humans at some point.

The HIV / AIDS epidemic originated in the city of Kinshasa in the 1920s, the current capital of Congo.(Photo: Getty Images)

Unlike other HIV strains, the M-1 group shows a more destructive ability and is the strain that is attacking most of the 35 million people infected with AIDS worldwide today.

Despite Kinshasa being a heterogeneous place, HIV seems to spread slowly outside the boundaries of the city. The virus takes up to 30 years to grow in three other cities of the large Congo country - Mbuji-Mayi, Lubumbashi and Kisangani - which are 1,600 kilometers away.

HIV is still growing within the Congo - a country the size of the western European region, until it spread to the US and around the world from the 1960s onwards, before the number of cases The virus exploded in the 1980s.

Because HIV exists "quietly" before causing Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) , the virus was only identified as the culprit in 1983. Around that time, thousands of people died because of AIDS-related diseases.

Since then, scientists have been promoting a long-standing war to improve the treatment of antiviral drugs, which slows down the proliferation of HIV and allows some patients to stay healthy. decades. Thanks to their efforts and propaganda and education about safe sex, world AIDS deaths have been declining since 2005, when the record number of record infections was 2, 3 million people, down to 1.5 million last year.

Professor Oliver Pybus of Oxford University (UK), head of the new study, announced his work and his colleagues as the most comprehensive genetic analysis of HIV ever.

Since its inception, the HIV / AIDS epidemic has claimed the lives of about 40 million people around the globe so far. Germs spread by blood, semen, breast milk, and often through unsafe sex or viral needles.