HIV Pandemic Traced Back to 1920's Congo

The Christofascists and falsely named "family values" organizations consistently claim that AIDS/HIV is God's punishment inflicted on gays for their failure to adhere to the Christofascists hate and fear based religious beliefs.  The truth, of course, is something far different and conveniently ignores the reality that in Africa where the highest incidences of HIV/AIDS are among heterosexuals.  Not that the "godly folks" ever let the truth get in the way of their theocratic, hate-filled agenda.  Now, a new research has traced the beginning of the HIV/AIDS pandemic to the 1920's in the Congo.  Reuters has details.  Here are highlights:

Bustling transport networks, migrant labor and changes to the sex trade in early 20th-century Congo created a "perfect storm" that gave rise to an HIV pandemic that has now infected 75 million people worldwide, researchers said on Thursday.

In an analysis of the genetic history of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS, the scientists said the global pandemic almost certainly began its global spread in the 1920s in Kinshasa in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). 

Here, a confluence of factors including urban growth, extensive railway links during Belgian colonial rule and changes in sexual behavior combined to see HIV emerge in Congo's capital and spread across the globe. 


Oliver Pybus, a professor at Oxford University's zoology department who co-led the research, said that until now most studies have taken a piecemeal approach to HIV's genetic history and looked only at certain HIV genomes in particular locations.

"For the first time, we have analyzed all the available evidence using the latest phylogeographic techniques, which enable us to statistically estimate where a virus comes from," he said. "This means we can say with a high degree of certainty where and when the HIV pandemic originated."

United Nations AIDS agency (UNAIDS) data show that more than 35 million people worldwide are currently infected with HIV, and some 1.5 million people died of AIDS-related illness in 2013.

Various strains of HIV are known to have been transmitted from primates and apes to humans at least 13 times in history, but only one of those transmissions - of a strain known as HIV-1 Group M - led to the current human pandemic. 


The team's findings also suggest that along with transport, social changes such as the changing behavior of sex workers and public health initiatives against other diseases that led to the unsafe use of needles may have contributed to turning HIV into a full-blown epidemic.

"We think it is likely that the social changes around the independence in 1960 saw the virus break out from small groups of infected people to infect the wider population and eventually the world," said Faria. 

To date some 40 million people have died of AIDS and the vast majority have been heterosexuals.  So the next time you hear some preacher bellowing from the pulpit about gays and AIDS, ask them to explain what has happened in Africa.   It should also be noted that the use of condoms by both gays and straights can reduce the transmission of HIV.  However, the Roman Catholic Church and some evangelical Christians oppose any form of birth control  as they try to increase the number of members of their cults.  Never mind that opposition to condoms has caused many to die needlessly.