A group of men, armed with rifles are walking through the woods. They go after all kinds of prey – antilopes, wild boars and monkeys.
Hunters gather around a carcass of a chimpanzee. When they get back to town, they'll sell it as a wildmeat delicacy.
For decades, bushmeat hunting has been a tradition and a huge industry in many African countries.
Scientists believe that hunters, who processed monkey meat that was infected with SIV – the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus, contracted it themselves from contaminated blood, through small cuts and bruises. The SIV then mutated, breaking the human immune barrier, and became what is now known as HIV.
By the 1980s, the HIV virus made it over to other countries, including the US, with major outbreaks occurring in San Francisco and New York.
But while it was almost impossible to identify the first person who got infected in Africa during the 1920s, scientists and journalists have put a lot of effort into finding out who was to blame for the outbreak in the Western World in the early 80’s.
Randy Shilts, author of the 1987 book called “And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic” investigated the story of “Patient Zero” – the man who is believed to be the first major transmitter of the disease. According to Shilts, doctors were able to link at least 40 initial HIV cases to a French-Canadian gay man – a flight attendant called Gaetan Dugas who had a large network of sexual contacts across the US.
In a YouTube video Randy Shilts said that it is through Gaetan Dugas, that doctors finally realized that they’re dealing with an infectious disease.
“With Gaetan you get a horrible combination of circumstances. You got a guy who has unlimited sexual stamina, who’s very attractive, so he has unlimited opportunity to act out that sexual stamina, and he’s a flight attendant with Air Canada, so he gets these flight passes so he could fly all over, to any number of cities”.
Shilts portrayed Dugas as being deliberate in knowingly infecting his sexual partners with the HIV virus, but his critics say the opposite. They believe that until his death from AIDS-related kidney failure in 1984, Dugas was doing what he could to educate people about HIV and to stop the further spread of the disease.
Recent studies have questioned the “Patient Zero” theory, and scientists have argued that the virus was brought from Haiti to the US in the late 1960’s, and not in the 1980’s.
Even though current statistics show that the majority of people with HIV live in Sub-Saharan Africa, other regions and continents are also largely affected. With 5 million patients in Asia Pacific, 2.4 million in Europe and North America, and with only 41% of patients receiving antiretroviral therapy globally, the “modern plague” remains a huge problem for people all over the world.
