Thanks to the alert 5FF reader who sent this in.
(You don’t think I actually read the Globe & Mail do you?).
Everyone who ever said we should have left Africa alone to rot like the basketcase it always was now vindicated:
Dr. Pepin’s book, The Origin of AIDS, is gaining attention for some of its surprising conclusions. He collects evidence that the virus spread not only through sexual activity but, crucially, through well-meaning European doctors and nurses fighting tropical diseases in pre-independence Africa.
They used syringes and needles to inject hundreds of patients a day in medical campaigns against diseases such as sleeping sickness, tuberculosis and leprosy. In the process, Dr. Pepin believes, they helped turn a virus infecting a lone ape hunter in Africa into a global epidemic with some 32 million victims. (…)
His work led him to connect the dots between that first bush hunter, who probably got infected with HIV while manipulating chimpanzee meat, to the sex trade in fast-growing African cities decades later. Then, in a more speculative turn, he believes the virus bridged the Atlantic with a single Haitian teacher returning home in the 1960s after working in Zaire, before spreading through a Haitian plasma centre, sex tourism and finally surfacing among gay men in California.
