New Research Reveals HIV/AIDS Epidemic First Found In Humans in 1921

A Canadian professor's groundbreaking look at the genesis of the AIDS virus is generating global buzz for shedding new light onto the world's most devastating pandemic.
As The New York Times is reporting, Dr. Jacques Pepin's "The Origins of AIDS," published earlier this month by Cambridge University Press, traces the improbable journey of HIV/AIDS to a single bush hunter (dubbed "patient zero") in central Africa who "manipulated chimpanzee meat" in 1921:

Dr. Pepin sifts the blizzard of scientific papers written about AIDS, adds his own training in epidemiology, his own observations from treating patients in a bush hospital, his studies of the blood of elderly Africans, and years of digging in the archives of the European colonial powers, and works out the most likely path the virus took during the years it left almost no tracks.Working slowly forward from 1900, he explains how Belgian and French colonial policies led to an incredibly unlikely event: a fragile virus infecting a small minority of chimpanzees slipped into the blood of a handful of hunters, one of whom must have sent it down a chain of “amplifiers” — disease eradication campaigns, red-light districts, a Haitian plasma center and gay sex tourism. Without those amplifiers, the virus would not be what it now is: a grim pilgrim atop a mountain of 62 million victims, living and dead.