A NEW genetic history of HIV shows how the pandemic almost certainly took root in the 1920s in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, researchers said Thursday.
Assisted by train transport and the sex trade, the virus that causes AIDS then spread across the continent and eventually the world, infecting some 75 million people and killing 36 million of them.
An international team of researchers reconstructed the genetic history of the HIV-1 group M pandemic, and found that the common ancestor of group M is “highly likely” to have emerged in Kinshasa around 1920.
While various strains of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) have jumped from primates and apes to humans at least 13 times, only one such transmission event has led to a human pandemic.
And it did because it was aided by “a ‘perfect storm’ of factors, including urban growth, strong railway links during Belgian colonial rule, and changes to the sex trade, combined to see HIV emerge from Kinshasa and spread across the globe” between the 1920s and 1950s, said the study in the journal Science.
“For the first time we have analysed all the available evidence using the latest phylogeographic techniques, which enable us to statistically estimate where a virus comes from,” said senior author Oliver Pybus of Oxford University’s Department of Zoology.
“This means we can say with a high degree of certainty where and when the HIV pandemic originated.”
Source: http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle
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