Main description:

It is now forty years since the discovery of AIDS, but its origins continue to puzzle doctors, scientists and patients. Inspired by his own experiences working as a physician in a bush hospital in Zaire, Jacques Pepin looks back to the early twentieth-century events in central 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 military campaigns, urbanisation, prostitution and large-scale colonial medical interventions intended to eradicate tropical diseases combined to disastrous effect to fuel the spread of the virus from its origins in Leopoldville to the rest of Africa, the Caribbean and ultimately worldwide. This is an essential perspective on HIV/AIDS and on the lessons that must be learned as the world faces another pandemic.

Contents:

Introduction; 1. Out of Africa; 2. The Source; 3. The Timing; 4. The Cut Hunter; 5. The Scramble for Central Africa; 6. Tropical Boom Towns; 7. The Oldest Profession; 8. Injections and the Transmission of Viruses; 9. The Legacies of French Colonial Medicine; 10. The Legacies of Belgian Tropical Medicine; 11. The Other Human Immunodeficiency Viruses; 12. From the Congo to the Caribbean; 13. The Blood Trade; 14. A Long Journey; 15. Globalisation; 16. A False Villain, a Genuine Hero; 17. Epilogue