![]() One of their errors, he says, was overlooking the effectiveness of male circumcision. Timberg says when Western countries later became serious about fighting the African AIDS epidemic, international AIDS groups didn't follow Uganda's model - and overlooked some relatively simple and inexpensive approaches proven to stem the spread of HIV. Many African countries initially ignored the AIDS crisis, but some nations - like Uganda and Zimbabwe - were successful in providing public health information and slowing the spread of the disease. ![]() You can't have HIV spreading like this.' But in Africa, it did." "When they began to write their papers about this, the peer-reviewed medical journals were like, 'You're crazy. "The first researchers who began to look into the HIV epidemic in Africa found these unbelievable rates of infection that frankly horrified them and terrified them," he says. But across Africa, he says, it was a different story. In the 1980s in the United States, there was a large resistance to the idea that HIV and AIDS could spread widely among a heterosexual population - in part, says Timberg, because it didn't happen in many places. "So every HIV virus in the United States or Europe or the Caribbean can be traced to a single ancestor, a single virus that came over from Kinshasa in the 1960s." "From Haiti, it brews up for a few years and then it makes its way into the United States, and from the United States it comes back and infects Europe through airline traffic," he says. So there's not much evidence that anybody at the time had any evidence that there was a new sickness." "You have diarrhea, you have fevers, you have wasting. "But you have to bear in mind, when HIV progresses into AIDS, it looks like a lot of other diseases," he says. At that point, 1,000 to 2,000 people likely had HIV, says Timberg. In 1960, the Belgians gave up Congo, which then became an independent country again. "You had the kind of human movement that could really get an epidemic moving," says Timberg. Leopoldville was a Belgian territory and by 1920 had become the capital of the Belgian Congo - complete with factories, shipyards, railways and single-sex dormitories for the workers, who were thrust into urban living conditions. human movement in areas where humans didn't live in great density before colonialism arrived - you had the arrival of the rubber trade and the ivory trade, and suddenly you had to go into these very deep parts of the forest that were not hospitable to humans before and since."įrom Cameroon, strains of HIV migrated down into other parts of central Africa and then into Leopoldville, which is now called Kinshasa. "The best theory is that a human caught a chimp, was butchering a chimp - which is a very bloody business - and in the process of that cut his hand, and the virus mutated as it went into the human bloodstream," says Timberg. In the past 100 years, 99 percent of all of the world's deaths from AIDS have come from a strain of the virus called HIV-1 group M, which first appeared in remote parts of Cameroon, where African porters worked a century ago cutting paths across dense brush in places where humans had never before traveled. "It was only with the introduction of these new transport routes, of these human movements, that HIV popped out of the chimpanzee population and starts an epidemic among the human population and became what we see today," he says. It was only when colonial powers migrated across parts of Africa - where the SIV virus existed among the chimps - that the virus started to spread among humans. Timberg tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies that the simian version of HIV - which is called SIV - has been around for thousands of years. Timberg, the former Johannesburg bureau chief for The Washington Post, with his co-author Daniel Halperin, an AIDS expert currently at the University of North Carolina, explores the history of the HIV virus and efforts to fight the AIDS epidemic in his book Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Tinderbox Subtitle How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It Author Craig Timberg and Daniel, Ph.D.
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