AIDS emerged in the Congo in the 1920s, reveals genetic history – veja.com

HIV

AIDS emerged in Kinshasa, capital of Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1920s, before spreading around the world, researchers concluded that the reconstructed path of the virus responsible for the death of 36 million people. The virologists already knew that HIV was transmitted from monkeys to man, but now the analysis of researchers from the Universities of Oxford, England, and Louvain, Belgium, suggest that between 1920 and 1950 a number of factors – such as rapid urbanization, the construction of railways in the Democratic Republic of Congo (then Belgian Congo) and changes in the sex trade -. favored the spread of AIDS from Kinshasa

“Our research suggests that (.. .) there was a small moment in time the Belgian Congo that allowed this particular strain of HIV emerge and spread, “says Professor Oliver Pybus of Oxford Department of Zoology and a lead author of the study. “The information indicates that the colonial archives in the late 1940s more than one million people moved annually by Kinshasa by rail,” said Nuno Faria, University of Oxford, co-author of the research. “The genetic data also tell us that HIV spread very quickly through the Congo, an area equivalent to Western Europe, moving with people by railways and waterways.”

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Thus, HIV arrived in Mbuji -Mayi and Lubumbashi, in the extreme south of the country, and Kisangani in the north, between the late 1930s and early 1950s These migrations have allowed the virus to establish the first secondary foci of infection in regions that had good network communication with countries of southern and eastern Africa, the researchers said. “We believe that changes in society are given at the time of independence of Congo in 1960, and probably the virus could escape in small groups of people living with HIV to infect broader population before spreading around the world” in the late 1970, reveals Faria. Besides the development of transport, some social changes, especially involving sex workers, who had a large number of customers, and increased access to syringes shared by drug users, did expand the epidemic.

(With Agence France-Presse)

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