In Randy Shilts’ history of AIDS, “And the Band Played On,” he tells the story of an Air Canada steward named Gaëtan Dugas, who suffered from what Dugas called “gay cancer” and infected 40 people or more with HIV.
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1908: Research reveals “AIDS began with a spillover from one chimp to one human, in or near a small southeastern wedge of Cameroon, around 1908,” Quammen writes. The most likely way it jumped species was through a person Quammen calls the “Cut Hunter” — a man who hunted and butchered a chimpanzee infected with simian immunodeficiency virus and was wounded in the process. The chimp’s blood mingled with his through the cuts in his skin.
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1910s-20s: Chances are the Cut Hunter infected only one other person, and HIV likely spread on a one-to-one basis through sexual contact, working its way down the Sangha River in Cameroon to the Congo, eventually reaching the city of Leopoldville (later Kinshasa). Why did no one notice? Life expectancy in that time and place wasn’t that high. And the infected were likely to die of some other common disease, with no one suspecting that their immune systems were compromised.
Questioning the veracity of everything in here, especially if it's coming from the NY Post Scientists have been looking for the earliest case forever and I think it'd be a bigger story if it were true.
And if it happened this early, I'm sure there would be evidence of clustered cases like there were in San Francisco in the 80s.
Scientists have been looking for the earliest case forever and I think it'd be a bigger story if it were true.
