Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures, maps and table
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Note on terminology
- Introduction
- 1 Out of Africa
- 2 The source
- 3 The timing
- 4 The cut hunter
- 5 Societies in transition
- 6 The oldest trade
- 7 Injections and the transmission of viruses
- 8 The legacies of colonial medicine I
- 9 The legacies of colonial medicine II
- 10 The other human immunodeficiency viruses
- 11 From the Congo to the Caribbean
- 12 The blood trade
- 13 The globalisation
- 14 Assembling the puzzle
- 15 Epilogue
- References
- Appendix Classification of retroviruses
- Index
15 - Epilogue
lessons learned
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures, maps and table
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Note on terminology
- Introduction
- 1 Out of Africa
- 2 The source
- 3 The timing
- 4 The cut hunter
- 5 Societies in transition
- 6 The oldest trade
- 7 Injections and the transmission of viruses
- 8 The legacies of colonial medicine I
- 9 The legacies of colonial medicine II
- 10 The other human immunodeficiency viruses
- 11 From the Congo to the Caribbean
- 12 The blood trade
- 13 The globalisation
- 14 Assembling the puzzle
- 15 Epilogue
- References
- Appendix Classification of retroviruses
- Index
Summary
Twenty-nine million deaths later, are there any useful lessons that can be drawn from this tragedy? Or was it just an extraordinary confluence of chance events, unlikely ever to be repeated? In retrospect, two factors probably drove the emergence of SIVcpz into HIV-1. Even if their respective contributions will never be fully sorted out, there is little doubt that without them the pandemic would not have developed.
The first was the profound social changes that accompanied the European colonisation of central Africa, eventually leading to sexual behaviours far different from those of traditional societies which had lived there for 2,000 years. A relatively small number of women had sex against remuneration, initially with a few regular clients, and then, after 1960, with a large number of men, a process which amplified the transmission of sexually transmitted pathogens, both the traditional ones (gonorrhoea, syphilis, etc.) and the emerging one, HIV-1. This is just another example of the complex relationships between social changes and diseases. Tuberculosis emerged as an important cause of adult mortality in nineteenth-century Europe, when the industrial revolution brought many poor peasants to the cities where they lived in crowded, unhealthy conditions conducive to the transmission of this respiratory pathogen.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Origins of AIDS , pp. 235 - 237Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011