{"id":110863,"date":"2021-01-30T16:26:31","date_gmt":"2021-01-30T16:26:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/precoinnews.com\/?p=110863"},"modified":"2021-01-30T16:26:31","modified_gmt":"2021-01-30T16:26:31","slug":"first-aids-patient-was-wwi-soldier-who-was-hunting-chimps-for-food-claims-doc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/precoinnews.com\/world-news\/first-aids-patient-was-wwi-soldier-who-was-hunting-chimps-for-food-claims-doc\/","title":{"rendered":"First AIDs patient ‘was WWI soldier who was hunting chimps for food,’ claims doc"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

Professor Jacques Pepin, an epidemiologist at Universit\u00e9 de Sherbrooke in Canada, concluded in 2011 that HIV likely infected a hunter in Cameroon at the start of the 20th century. <\/p>\n

The virus was then thought to have spread throughout L\u00e9opoldville, now known as Kinshasa in the Congo, later travelling overseas. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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Professor Pepin claims soldiers spent "three or four months in Moloundou" before moving through Africa and their main problem would have been "starvation".<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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".<\/p>\n

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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".<\/p>\n

After this, the soldier came back to L\u00e9opoldville, and "probably started the very first strain of transmission in L\u00e9opoldville itself".<\/p>\n

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."<\/p>\n

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