A top doctor who has dedicated his life to discovering the origin of HIV claims the first human patient was a World War One soldier who caught HIV from a chimp.
Professor Jacques Pepin, an epidemiologist at Université de Sherbrooke in Canada, concluded in 2011 that HIV likely infected a hunter in Cameroon at the start of the 20th century.
The virus was then thought to have spread throughout Léopoldville, now known as Kinshasa in the Congo, later travelling overseas.
Dr Pepin has now revised his hypothesis in a new book called The Origins of AIDs and insists the original Patient Zero was not a hunter, but a starving World War One soldier.
He told MailOnlne the soldier is likely to have caught the disease while hunting for food in a remote forest around Moloundou, Cameroon in 1916.
Professor Pepin claims soldiers spent "three or four months in Moloundou" before moving through Africa and their main problem would have been "starvation".
He said soldiers would have run out of food very quickly and although supplies were sent in by river logistical issues led to mass starvation.
Soldiers were then forced to hunt any animal that could be eaten, he claims, and Dr Pepin believers "one of the soldiers got infected while hunting in the forest".
Dr Pepin theorises that a "chimpanzee was killed and when cutting the animal to bring it back, there was an injury which got infected with the virus".
After this, the soldier came back to Léopoldville, and "probably started the very first strain of transmission in Léopoldville itself".
Professor Pepin said: "All of a sudden you have 1,600 soldiers with rifles and plenty of ammunition, so the level of hunting in that area went up dramatically over these few months."
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He added: "My hypothesis is that one of the soldiers got infected while hunting in the forest. A chimpanzee was killed and when cutting the animal to bring it back, there was an injury which got infected with the virus.
"Eventually, the soldier, after the war, came back all the way to Léopoldville and probably started the very first train of transmission in Léopoldville itself."
The doctor claims the spread of HIV was then likely to have propelled through dirty needles in hospitals, prostitution, and an influx of refugees and migrants in 1960.
Professor Pepin says: "Every year prostitutes would have up to 1,500 clients. That was perfect for the sexual amplification of HIV between these high volume sex workers and their clients.
"That's when really sexual transmission became accelerated in the 1960s."
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