The Origins of AIDS [Hardcover]
Author: Jacques Pepin | Language: English | ISBN: 1107006635 | Format: PDF, EPUB
The Origins of AIDS
You can download The Origins of AIDS [Hardcover] from mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link
You can download The Origins of AIDS [Hardcover] from mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link
It is now thirty years since the discovery of AIDS but its origins continue to puzzle doctors and scientists. Inspired by his own experiences working as an infectious diseases physician in Africa, Jacques Pepin looks back to the early twentieth-century events in 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 urbanization, prostitution, and large-scale colonial medical campaigns 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 new perspective on HIV/AIDS and on the lessons that must be learnt if we are to avoid provoking another pandemic in the future.
Books with free ebook downloads available The Origins of AIDS [Hardcover] - Hardcover: 310 pages
- Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (October 17, 2011)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1107006635
- ISBN-13: 978-1107006638
- Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,658,289 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
This well written and fascinating book is a cogent attempt to reconstruct the process that generated the great HIV pandemic. The author is a Canadian infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist with considerable experience in HIV-related research, including a good deal of work in Africa. Based on a careful synthesis of research and his own archival investigations, Pepin presents a synthesis of molecular epidemiology, traditional epidemiology, and social history to explain the emergence of HIV.
Pepin begins with the generally accepted idea that HIV crossed from its chimpanzee ancestor in central Africa sometime in the early 20th century, very likely because of hunting of chimps for meat. This concept is supported by molecular phylogenetic reconstructions and the fact that the bush meat trade probably increased markedly in the relevant area of central Africa with greater demand for meat and greater availability of firearms. Pepin estimates the number of individuals affected in this way to be very small, perhaps as small as 1 - 2. These infections would have been a dead end without some amplifying mechanism, which Pepin suggests was the widespread use of parenteral treatments for several tropical diseases. In the first half of the 20th century, French and Belgian colonial governments pursued impressive public health campaigns to suppress Sleeping Sickness and other illnesses. Many of these campaigns involved indiscriminate use of parenteral treatments with reusable and inadequately sterilized needles and syringes, a fertile breeding ground of this type of viral infection. The result was an expanded pool of infected individuals in rural French and Belgian central Africa.
Despite its academic nature this book is a page-turner, you will enjoy it like a really brilliant CSI episode. Dr. Jacques Pépin was quite successful in writing a book that reaches both academics and the laymen. Until now all the serious discussions and theories about the origins of the AIDS pandemic had been limited to academic journals. The book point of departure is based on these research findings, which are presented in the first chapters, and provide a comprehensive and very good summary of the state-of-the-art for the laymen. The reader shouldn't be intimated by some technical language, as the book was written for all audiences and the author did the extra work of explaining medical jargon for the general public when required, and anyway, most of the times you do not need to remember all of it to fully grasp the main storyline (just keep in mind a few key concepts, particularly the definition of HIV-1 group M, and subgroups B and C). Also from the start, Dr. Pépin debunks the two most common theories that tried to explain the origin of the AIDS pandemic.
After a very impressive Sherlock Holmes-like detective work through historical records, Dr. Pépin develops a very plausible explanation, going back to the colonial era in the early 1900s all the way to the early 1980s, with very solid theory, based on both circumstantial and hard evidence, following the path of the virus from Africa, to Haiti, and to the U.S., Europe and the rest of the world. The author did not intended to go any further, as the history and evolution of AIDS has been already covered by several authors.
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