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Summary
The hunt for the origin of the AIDS virus began over twenty years ago. It was a journey that went around the world and involved painstaking research to unravel how, when, and where the virus first infected humans.Dorothy H. Crawford traces the story back to the remote rain forests of Africa - home to the primates that carry the ancestral virus - and reveals how HIV-1 first jumped from chimpanzees to humans in rural south east Cameroon. Examining how this happened, and how it then travelled back to Colonial west central Africa where it eventually exploded as a pandemic, she asks why and how it was able to spread so widely. From hospital intensive care wards to research laboratories and the African rain forests, this is the wide-ranging story of a killer virus and a tale of scientific endeavour.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Scottish virologist Crawford (Viruses: A Very Short Introduction) celebrates the brilliant "evolutionary sleuthing" that helped solve the puzzle of the origins of HIV, a "virus unlike any other" that has now infected over 60 million people. The University of Edinburgh professor explains that those hunting for the source of the virus that causes AIDS collectively "scoured the medical literature," hunted for old blood samples to test for HIV, and painstakingly analyzed genomes from around the world to find the answers they were looking for. Researchers discovered that though the scourge didn't make headlines until the early 1980s, its roots stretch back into the west central Africa of the early 20th century. They also found that the "natural reservoir" of the predecessor of HIV turned out to be a subspecies of chimpanzee whose infection "jumped" to humans-likely through exposure to infected blood during hunts-to arrive in the U.S. around 1969. Crawford's "incredible tale of medical detection" also offers an absorbing take on African history, politics, and culture, as well as the invasion of European explorers and slave traders. This dense but engrossing history will appeal primarily to scientists, but it has a much broader significance: by "understanding where, how, when and why the virus evolved and spread among us, we can surely work to prevent the next one." 21 b&w illus. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A meticulous unfolding of how, when, where and why HIV took off. Make that HIV-1, group M, as one thing Crawford (Medicine/Univ. of Edinburgh; The Invisible Enemy: A Natural History of Viruses, 2003, etc.) makes clear is that the world of simian and human immunodeficiency viruses (SIVs and HIVs) is rich, complex and constantly changing due to high mutation rates. By 1983, it was known that a virus was the cause of AIDS. Researchers quickly established that the "gay disease" in America was the same as the heterosexual "slim disease" in central Africa, both caused by a retrovirus of the lentivirus, or slow virus family, so-called because of the long lag time between infection and the end stages of disease. The canny observation of a similar disease in Asian macaques at the U.S. National Primate Centers spurred a focus on primates in Africa; there was reason to believe that the macaques had picked up an SIV from African primates there. How the simian virus jumped to humans is a tangled tale whose unraveling involved international collaborations among epidemiologists, demographers, virologists and evolutionary molecular biologists. The researchers eventually pinned down the origins of HIV-1 to chimpanzees in Cameroon, and the less aggressive HIV-2 disease to West African sooty mangabeys. Getting to that point meant digging into stored blood and tissue samples in Europe and Africa, testing captive primates, and developing techniques for extracting HIV antibodies and viral DNA from urine and fecal samples from primates in the wild. The current consensus is that HIV-1 cases date back to the 1900s and were amplified in the 1920s by mass vaccinations and unsterilized needles. AIDS became a pandemic in recent decades thanks to warfare, global travel, changing mores, movements to cities, the growth of commercial sex workers and the market for bush meat, to name only the most prominent in a vast array of factors. A wonderful source book for professionals and a highly informative, often engrossing tale for lay readers willing to apply due diligence.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Choice Review
Crawford (emer., Univ. of Edinburgh, UK), a virologist and writer (e.g., Viruses, CH, Jul'12, 49-6265), provides a contemporary summary of what is known about the origins of HIV and its movement from chimpanzees and mangabeys to humans. As the author notes, the book emphasizes when and how the virus infected humans; it does not focus on describing the disease itself. The account begins with the discovery of a formerly unknown virus, now classified in two major categories, HIV-1 and HIV-2, and traces the origins of HIV-1 and HIV-2 to central and western Africa. The association of HIV with AIDS was not without controversy. Koch's postulates, the series of experiments applied in linking an etiological agent with a disease, was a poor fit when applied to HIV. Some, most notably retrovirologist Peter Duesberg, refused to accept the association. Despite the presence of the disease in some hemophiliacs, exposed only through HIV-contaminated factor VIII, Duesberg remains skeptical. Crawford describes alternate theories of initial human infection, including the now-debunked argument of contaminated polio vaccines. Her writing is crisp and clear. This reviewer has only one minor quibble: the book states that reverse transcriptase converts the RNA genome--the genome is copied, not converted. Summing Up: Recommended. All academic and professional audiences. R. Adler University of Michigan, Dearborn
Library Journal Review
In this captivating work, virologist Crawford (microbiology, Univ. of Edinburgh; Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped Our History) unravels the mysterious origin of HIV. Simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) jumped several times from chimpanzees or gorillas to humans, creating different strains of HIV, including the HIV-1 strain responsible for the current pandemic. The author posits the "cut hunter" theory, suggesting that the virus probably moved from chimpanzees to humans via a lacerated hunter who handled an infected chimp. This transfer likely happened in Cameroon around 1900, Crawford writes in this well-told narrative. Humans then carried the disease to present-day Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo), sometime before 1924. The city then was a boomtown, with male migrants who came for work, leaving their wives home in the villages. This created a thriving sex trade, which helped spread HIV. Upon gaining independence, DR Congo recruited foreign workers, many coming from Haiti. One Haitian returned home with the virus, probably in 1966, spreading the disease to the Western Hemisphere. From there, the disease arrived in the United States around 1969. VERDICT This engaging work will appeal to a broad audience.-Jeffrey Beall, Univ. of Colorado Denver Lib. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Preface |
| Introduction: a new disease |
| 1 The puzzle of HIV-1 |
| 2 Tracing HIV to its roots |
| 3 The primate connection |
| 4 From rain forest to research laboratory |
| 5 Timing SIV cpz's jump to humans |
| 6 A vital first step for HIV-1 group M |
| 7 Beginning the epic journey |
| 8 HIV-1 group M meets the challenge |
| 9 Past, present, and future pandemics |
| References |
| Further reading |
| Glossary |