‘Perfect storm’ led to spread of HIV

A ‘perfect storm’ led to the global spread of the HIV pandemic, which has its roots in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo suggests new research. An international team of scientists has reconstructed the genetic history of the HIV-1 group M pandemic, which saw the disease spread across Africa and globally, specifying Kinshasa as the point the origin. “We have analysed all the available evidence using the latest phylogeographic techniques, which enable us to statistically estimate where a virus comes from,” said Professor Oliver Pybus from the University of Oxford. “This means we can say with a high degree of certainty where and when the HIV pandemic originated.” “It seems a combination of factors in Kinshasa in the early 20^th Century created a ‘perfect storm’ for the emergence of HIV, leading to a generalised epidemic with unstoppable momentum that unrolled across sub-Saharan Africa.” The study, published in Science, required the development of a statistical framework for reconstructing the spread of viruses through space and time from their genome sequences. “Once the pandemic’s spatiotemporal origins were clear they could be compared with historical data and it became evident that the early spread of HIV-1 from Kinshasa to other population centres followed predictable patterns,” said Professor Philippe Lemey from the University of Leuven. Analysis suggests that between the 1920s and 1950s factors including urban growth, strong railway links and changes to the sex trade combined to see HIV emerge and spread. “Data from colonial archives tells us that by the end of the 1940s over one million people were travelling through Kinshasa on the railways each year,” said Nuno Faria, also from Oxford. “Our genetic data tells us that HIV spread very quickly…travelling with people along railways and waterways.” “We think it is likely that the social changes around the independence [from Belgian Colonial rule] in 1960 saw the virus ‘break out’ from small groups of infected people to infect the wider population and eventually the world.” Public health initiatives against other diseases that led to the unsafe use of needles may also have contributed to HIV’s emergence, but the team say more research is needed in order to fully understand the role of different social factors on the origins of the virus’ pandemic. HIV has been transmitted from primates and apes to humans at least 13 times, but only one has led to a human pandemic. Around 75 million infections have occurred to date. The early spread and epidemic ignition of HIV-1 in human populations