Technology

news.com.au | science
Oxford University researchers show HIV
originated in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of
Congo
A NEW genetic history of HIV shows how the pandemic almost certainly took root in the 1920s in Kinshasa in
the Democratic Republic of Congo, researchers said Thursday.
Assisted by train transport and the sex trade, the virus that causes AIDS then spread across the continent and eventually
the world, infecting some 75 million people and killing 36 million of them.
An international team of researchers reconstructed the genetic history of the HIV-1 group M pandemic, and found that
the common ancestor of group M is highly likely to have emerged in Kinshasa around 1920.
While various strains of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) have jumped from primates and apes to humans at least
13 times, only one such transmission event has led to a human pandemic.
And it did because it was aided by a perfect storm of factors, including urban growth, strong railway links during
Belgian colonial rule, and changes to the sex trade, combined to see HIV emerge from Kinshasa and spread across the
globe between the 1920s and 1950s, said the study in the journal Science.
For the first time we have analysed all the available evidence using the latest phylogeographic techniques, which enable
us to statistically estimate where a virus comes from, said senior author Oliver Pybus of Oxford Universitys Department
of Zoology.
This means we can say with a high degree of certainty where and when the HIV pandemic originated.
BY: AFP
FROM: NEWS CORP AUSTRALIA NETWORK
2 DAYS AGO OCTOBER 04, 2014 1:50PM
The HIV virus ... new research has shown where it emerged, and how it became a global pandemic. Source: News Limited
A key factor in the pandemics spread was the use of trains as transport, which helped bring the virus from isolated
pockets of people into the larger city, which was Kinshasa, among the best connected of all central African cities.
Data from colonial archives tells us that by the end of 1940s over one million people were travelling through Kinshasa
on the railways each year, said Nuno Faria of Oxford Universitys Department of Zoology, first author of the paper.
Then, looking at genetic data, scientists could see that HIV spread across what is now the Democratic Republic of the
Congo (formerly the Belgian Congo and Zaire) to other major cities, by the early 1950s.
These regional hubs were connected to southern and eastern African countries.
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, Faria said.
These social changes include sex workers who took on a large number of clients, coupled with public health initiatives
against other diseases that led to the unsafe use of needles (which) may have contributed to turning HIV into a full-blown
epidemic, the study said.
Campaigns to treat people with sexually transmitted diseases may have been carried out using needles that were not
sterile, suggesting another route for HIV and co-infections with hepatitis C that are often seen in men in the DRC over
50.
HIV was first identified in 1981, and the AIDS epidemic ballooned for more than a decade until antiretroviral drugs were
created. These long-term regimens have transformed HIV from a fatal disease into a chronic condition for many of those
infected.
Researchers said further study is needed to understand the different social factors that enabled the virus to spread the
way it did.
Our primate cousins ... (a chimpanzee, pictured) ... scientists believe HIV jumped from primates to humans at least 13 times. Source: News Limited
SOURCE: http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/oxford-university-researchers-show-hiv-originated-in-kinshasa-democratic-republic-of-congo/story-
fn5fsgyc-1227079885896