The Origins of AIDS - Softcover

Pépin, Jacques

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1108720390 ISBN 13: 9781108720397

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2021

Synopsis

It is now forty years since the discovery of AIDS, but its origins continue to puzzle doctors, scientists and patients. Inspired by his own experiences working as a physician in a bush hospital in Zaire, Jacques Pépin looks back to the early twentieth-century events in central Africa that triggered the emergence of HIV/AIDS and traces its subsequent development into the most dramatic and destructive epidemic of modern times. He shows how the disease was first transmitted from chimpanzees to man and then how military campaigns, urbanisation, prostitution and large-scale colonial medical interventions intended to eradicate tropical diseases combined to disastrous effect to fuel the spread of the virus from its origins in Léopoldville to the rest of Africa, the Caribbean and ultimately worldwide. This is an essential perspective on HIV/AIDS and on the lessons that must be learned as the world faces another pandemic.

About this title

About the Author

Jacques Pépin is Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at Université de Sherbrooke, Canada. He has conducted research on infectious diseases in sixteen African countries.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1108720390
• ISBN 13: 9781108720397
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 394