On Friday, the Science Journal published a study exposing the origins of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) in Kinshasa in 1920. HIV causes the Acquired immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), a disease of the human immune system.
The study's journalists traced the origin of the disease to Kinshasa, a part if the Democratic Republic of Congo, using documented samples of HIV's chromosomal code. HIV is a mutation of simian immunodeficiency virus found in chimpanzees in Southern Cameroon. The researchers think it possibly entered the human species through virus-ridden blood from bush meat.
According to the scientists who used genomic sequencing and historical archives to trace the virus' origins, the cataclysmic emergence of HIV across Africa and into the greater realm started when an impeccable tempest of urban vicissitude debuted in Kinshasa in the '20s. HIV stayed as a local infection until it entered the capital of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
A transnational team of scientists headed by Britain's Oxford and Belgium's Leuven universities recreated the history of the HIV contagion using chronological accounts and DNA samples of the virus dating back to the '50s. The DNA permitted them to pull up a virus' family tree that traced its lineage through time and space. Using statistical representations they could push farther back than the 1950s and locate the pandemic's origin in Kinshasa in 1920s.
At the time, Central African HIV-infected populaces did not have unambiguous indications that would have been transcribed down in their medical records. The virus causes the immune system to weaken, leaving patients susceptible to all kinds of infections. Oxford University's evolutionary biologist and senior author of the study Oliver Pybus said, "For an epidemic like HIV where we're trying to track back to before it was even discovered, genetics is the only source of information we have."
From the late 1930s to the early 1950s, the virus spread by rail and river to Mbuji-Mayi and Lubumbashi in the south and Kisangani in the north. The virus took hold and shaped secondary reservoirs from where it spread to Southern and Eastern African nations. The genetic chronicles suggested the rapid spread of pandemic HIV spread from its Kinshasa origin through the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
As per the BBC statement of Oliver Pybus, "The second really interesting aspect is the transport networks that enabled people to move around a huge country." The report attributed the spread of the virus to a rapid population growth, a flourishing sex trade and unsterilized needles used in health clinics. The study also displayed that by the end of 1940, over a million people were using Kinshasa's railways allowing the rapid spread of the disease.
Originally, HIV was a contagion limited to specific groups of people. But the virus appeared to flight into the broad populace and spread globally after what was then recognized as the 1960 Republic of the Congo attained liberation.
Since the 1920s until 1960, the pandemic HIV strain spread originally from Kinshasa, crosses over borders to other nations, and eventually landed on distant landmasses. Around 1980, HIV first came to global attention and has since infected over 75 million people and left 36 million fatalities.
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