AS SUSPECTED: AIDS Began When Africans FUCKED MONKEYS! Or Vice Versa !

[Nade Ralpher]

"HIV made it out of southeastern Cameroon to eventually kill tens of
millions of people"


===============
"Co­lo­ni­al­ism in Africa helped launch the HIV epidemic a century
ago"


By Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin
February 27, 2012



WE ARE UNLIKELY to ever know all the details of the birth of the AIDS
epidemic. But a series of recent genetic discoveries have shed new
light on it, starting with the moment when a connection from chimp to
human changed the course of history.

We now know where the epidemic began: a small patch of dense forest in
southeastern Cameroon. We know when: within a couple of decades on
either side of 1900. We have a good idea of how: A hunter caught an
infected chimpanzee for food, allowing the virus to pass from the
chimp’s blood into the hunter’s body, probably through a cut during
butchering.

As to the why, here is where the story gets even more fascinating, and
terrible. We typically think of diseases in terms of how they threaten
us personally. But they have their own stories. Diseases are born.
They grow. They falter, and sometimes they die. In every case these
changes happen for reasons.

For decades nobody knew the reasons behind the birth of the AIDS
epidemic. But it is now clear that the epidemic’s birth and crucial
early growth happened during Africa’s colonial era, amid massive
intrusion of new people and technology into a land where ancient ways
still prevailed. European powers engaged in a feverish race for wealth
and glory blazed routes up muddy rivers and into dense forests that
had been traveled only sporadically by humans before.

The most disruptive of these intruders were thousands of African
porters. Forced into service by European colonial powers, they cut
paths through the exact area that researchers have now identified as
the birthplace of the AIDS epidemic. It was here, in a single moment
of transmission from chimp to human, that a strain of virus called
HIV-1 group M first appeared.

In the century since, it has been responsible for 99 percent of all of
the world’s deaths from AIDS — not just in Africa but in Moscow,
Bangkok, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, New York, Washington. All that
began when the West forced its will on an unfamiliar land, causing the
essential ingredients of the AIDS epidemic to combine.

It was here, by accident but with motives by no means pure, that the
world built a tinderbox and tossed in a spark.

The chimps of Cameroon

Many simians, such as gorillas and monkeys, can carry a virus that
resembles HIV. But scientists now know that HIV-1 group M was born
from a virus circulating among a community of chimpanzees concentrated
in Cameroon, a sprawling country with bustling Atlantic Ocean ports,
populous highlands, and a lightly developed southern region where
relatively few people live even today. This was home to the chimps.

Finding a more exact location took a remarkable degree of scientific
ingenuity. An international research team led by Beatrice Hahn of the
University of Alabama at Birmingham and Paul Sharp of the University
of Edinburgh developed an elaborate project that involved searching
for the simian virus in chimp feces collected across a vast swath of
southern Cameroon.

To find a strain of the simian virus that was, on a genetic level,
essentially indistinguishable from the most lethal form of HIV, the
research team set up 10 stations across the region. Two of the
stations were in the particularly remote southeastern corner of the
nation, as far as possible from major population centers.

It was in these two stations where Hahn and Sharp’s team discovered
samples of the simian virus that was almost a perfect match for the
HIV-1 group M that eventually killed tens of millions of humans.

This discovery, published in the journal Science in 2006, intensified
the quest for a birth date for the virus. Again, genetic research
offered the key clues.

Scientists had long known that a blood sample, preserved from 1959,
showed that HIV had been circulating in Kinshasa, the capital of
Congo, for several decades before the virus first drew international
attention in the 1980s. In 2008, evolutionary biologist Michael
Worobey sharpened that picture when he reported in the journal Nature
the discovery of a second sample of the virus, trapped in a wax-
encased lymph node biopsy from 1960.

By comparing these two historic pieces of virus and mapping out the
differences in their genetic structures in his lab at the University
of Arizona, Worobey determined that HIV-1 group M was much older than
anyone had thought. Both samples of the virus appeared to have
descended from a single ancestor at some time between 1884 and 1924.
The most likely date was 1908.

Taken together, these two discoveries offered the clearest clues to
the birth and early life of the epidemic.

Not far from where HIV-1 group M was born was a major river, the
Sangha, flowing toward the heart of Central Africa. This section of
the Sangha was not ideal for navigation because of its ribbons of
sandbars and the dense vegetation along its banks.

In the especially treacherous middle section, near where Hahn and
Sharp’s team found the viral ancestor of HIV, few major human
settlements ever developed. But there were numerous communities on the
Sangha’s more accessible stretches. And due south, past riverside
trading towns, was the mighty Congo River itself, the superhighway of
Central Africa.

Once the virus made the jump from chimp to human, a single infected
person could have carried HIV down the Sangha, onto the Congo River
and into Kinshasa. The Belgians had founded the city in 1881, during
what historians call “The Scramble for Africa,” when colonial powers
carved up the continent into areas of influence. By the early 20th
century Kinshasa, then called Leopoldville, was the biggest city in
Central Africa, fueled by the dizzying growth of trade with the
outside world.

A final, powerful bit of evidence supported the theory that Kinshasa
lay at the heart of the epidemic’s early movements.

Scientists studying HIV-1 group M already had found many related
varieties, what scientists call subtypes, each with slightly different
genetic structures and paths through the world. One, scientists
discovered, had traveled east from Kinshasa toward Lake Victoria. One
went south to Zambia, Botswana and South Africa. One hopped all the
way across the ocean to Haiti, then to the United States and Europe.

Many others traveled not very far at all, staying in the Congo Basin.
But as scientists plotted out the genetic histories of these varieties
and built an extensive family tree for HIV, they all appeared to have
spread from a single explosion, a big bang of the AIDS epidemic:
Ground Zero was Kinshasa.

Ivory and rubber

Powering the big bang was the burgeoning trade of colonial Africa.

Ivory may seem a touch quaint today, but in its heyday it was seen as
beautiful, versatile and essential to many everyday products. It was
used to make billiard balls, jewelry and cutlery. Furniture makers
incorporated it into their cabinets, artists into their statues.
Bagpipe makers used ivory for mounts, ferrules, buttons and
mouthpieces.

When supplies of ivory gradually grew short, as colonial agents killed
the once plentiful elephants by the thousands, rubber took its place
as the economic lifeblood of colonialism in the Congo Basin. The first
inflatable rubber tires for bicycles became popular in the 1890s. Mass
production of cars soon spiked demand for rubber tires again.

The only obstacle to European companies’ reaping huge profits was that
collecting ivory and rubber required massive amounts of labor. Getting
ivory from an elephant meant stalking the animal, killing it and
cutting off its tusks. Getting rubber from vines required slashing
them, collecting the oozing white sap and drying it — sometimes on the
collector’s own skin.

The solution to the manpower demands soon became obvious. Colonial
powers created what was essentially slavery: cheap muscle at the point
of a gun.

This approach was not confined to collecting ivory and rubber. These
industries created tremendous new needs for infrastructure to get
goods to oceangoing ships along the Atlantic coast. That meant African
porters had to carry goods and supplies anyplace the steamboats
couldn’t reach.

Workers were needed to build railroads, trading stations, dormitories.
And somebody needed to operate the steamboats, load the railroad cars,
carry the tusks or gobs of rubber in from the jungle. When workers
became unruly, the colonial companies deployed heavily armed soldiers
to keep the cogs of these vast enterprises moving.

All these roles were filled by Africans, many imported from villages
hundreds or even thousands of miles away. African life here was beyond
cheap. It was disposable. Contemporary accounts by journalists and
missionaries tell of colonial officials across the Congo Basin
ordering mass slaughters and the torching of restive villages while
creating forced settlements that resembled nothing so much as
concentration camps.

The role of African porters

In December 1895 German colonial authorities heard reports that
Cameroon’s southeastern corner contained fabulously rich ivory and
rubber stocks awaiting exploitation.

The Germans soon after gave authority to a colonial company to take
control of the region by force. Over the next four years they extended
their power all the way through southeastern Cameroon and established
a trading station on the Ngoko River about 75 miles upstream from
where its waters merged with the Sangha. In the wedge of land defined
by these two rivers, HIV either had just been born or soon would be.

The trading station was called Moloundou, and a busy town remains
there today. But at the time it was almost unimaginably remote. Few
human settlements had developed among these forbidding forests. And
there were only two practical ways out: by steamship down the Ngoko to
the Sangha and on to the Congo River; or overland by foot to the
Atlantic.

The river route was the easier of the two, and steamships transported
the bulk of the ivory and rubber collected in southeastern Cameroon.
But overland routes were necessary to connect Moloundou with other
trading stations and inland areas rich with rubber and ivory.

For these journeys the bounty was borne by Africans who carried loads
averaging 55 pounds each. At the peak of the foot traffic that would
develop between inland areas and the coast, the busy way station
recorded more than a thousand porters passing by on a typical day.

Trade routes, disease routes

Ominously, something else followed the rubber trade through Cameroon:
disease. Sleeping sickness, smallpox and skin infections were the most
obvious.

Colonial authorities attempted mass inoculation campaigns for smallpox
and set up quarantine zones that restricted where the porters were
allowed to travel. But even so, the diseases spread.

Among them was syphilis, which arrived with the Europeans. In just a
few years it reached epidemic proportions along porter routes and
riverside trading posts in Cameroon and throughout the Congo Basin.
It’s impossible now to determine how much of this spread resulted from
rapes as opposed to other kinds of encounters, but it’s clear that
colonial commerce created massive new networks of sexual interactions
— and massive new transmissions of infections. (In later decades,
transmission through the reuse of hypodermic needles in medical care
probably had some role in HIV’s spread as well.)

So HIV’s first journey looked something like this: A hunter killed an
infected chimp in the southeastern Cameroonian forest, and a simian
virus entered his body through a cut during the butchering, mutating
into HIV.

This probably had happened many times before, during the centuries
when the region had little contact with the outside world. But now
thousands of porters — both men and women — were crossing through the
area regularly, creating more opportunities for the virus to travel
onward to a riverside trading station such as Moloundou.

One of the first victims — whether a hunter, a porter or an ivory
collector — gave HIV to a sexual partner. There may have been a small
outbreak around the trading station before the virus found its way
aboard a steamship headed down the Sangha River.

For this fateful journey south, HIV could have ridden in the body of
these first victims, or it could have been somebody infected later: a
soldier or a laborer. Or it could have been carried by a woman: a
concubine, a trader.

It’s also possible that the virus moved down the river in a series of
steps, maybe from Moloundou to Ouesso, then onward to Bolobo on the
Congo River itself.

There might even have been a series of infections at trading towns
along the entire route downriver. Yet even within these riverside
trading posts HIV would have struggled to create anything more than a
short-lived, localized outbreak.

Most of this colonial world didn’t have enough potential victims for
such a fragile virus to start a major epidemic. HIV is harder to
transmit than many other infections. People can have sex hundreds of
times without passing the virus on. To spread widely, HIV requires a
population large enough to sustain an outbreak and a sexual culture in
which people often have more than one partner, creating networks of
interaction that propel the virus onward.

To fulfill its grim destiny, HIV needed a kind of place never before
seen in Central Africa but one that now was rising in the heart of the
region: a big, thriving, hectic place jammed with people and energy,
where old rules were cast aside amid the tumult of new commerce.

It needed Kinshasa. It was here, hundreds of miles downriver from
Cameroon, that HIV began to grow beyond a mere outbreak. It was here
that AIDS grew into an epidemic.

Laying the scientific story alongside the historical one offers one
final revelation. In the 1920s, as railroads became widely available,
the Sangha River’s value as a steamship route dwindled sharply. Global
rubber prices also collapsed. The pace of human movement through the
region eased.

So the improbable journey of the killer strain of HIV was feasible for
only a few hectic decades, from the 1880s to the 1920s. Without “The
Scramble for Africa,” it’s hard to see how HIV could have made it out
of southeastern Cameroon to eventually kill tens of millions of
people. Even a delay might have caused the killer strain of HIV to die
a lonely death deep in the forest.

From “Tinderbox” by Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA)
inc. Copyright © Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin, 2012. Timberg, a
former foreign correspondent in Africa, is acting national security
editor of The Washington Post. Halperin was a senior HIV prevention
adviser in the U.S. government’s global AIDS program and is now an
epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/colonialism-in-africa-helped-launch-the-hiv-epidemic-a-century-ago/2012/02/21/gIQAyJ9aeR_story.html

[NEMO]

Cocksucker William Grosvenor likes big black 'uns:

"Gobble - gobble, gobble - gobble, slurp - slurp, lick - lick!"


"Gulp - gulp, gulp - gulp!"


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[Mitt'sGirlOnTheSide]

Question:

Were the 'groes more attracted to the monkeys, or

vice versa?

[Trump'sBiggestCreditor]

Never

Eschew

My Mom's

Orifices


... NEMO