Virus Hunt
The search for the origin of HIV/AIDs
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- CHF 22.00
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- CHF 22.00
Beschreibung des Verlags
The hunt for the origin of the AIDS virus began over twenty years ago. It was a journey that went around the world and involved painstaking research to unravel how, when, and where the virus first infected humans.
Dorothy H. Crawford traces the story back to the remote rain forests of Africa - home to the primates that carry the ancestral virus - and reveals how HIV-1 first jumped from chimpanzees to humans in rural south east Cameroon. Examining how this happened, and how it then travelled back to Colonial west central Africa where it eventually exploded as a pandemic, she asks why and how it was able to spread so widely.
From hospital intensive care wards to research laboratories and the African rain forests, this is the wide-ranging story of a killer virus and a tale of scientific endeavour.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Scottish virologist Crawford (Viruses: A Very Short Introduction) celebrates the brilliant "evolutionary sleuthing" that helped solve the puzzle of the origins of HIV, a "virus unlike any other" that has now infected over 60 million people. The University of Edinburgh professor explains that those hunting for the source of the virus that causes AIDS collectively "scoured the medical literature," hunted for old blood samples to test for HIV, and painstakingly analyzed genomes from around the world to find the answers they were looking for. Researchers discovered that though the scourge didn't make headlines until the early 1980s, its roots stretch back into the west central Africa of the early 20th century. They also found that the "natural reservoir" of the predecessor of HIV turned out to be a subspecies of chimpanzee whose infection "jumped" to humans likely through exposure to infected blood during hunts to arrive in the U.S. around 1969. Crawford's "incredible tale of medical detection" also offers an absorbing take on African history, politics, and culture, as well as the invasion of European explorers and slave traders. This dense but engrossing history will appeal primarily to scientists, but it has a much broader significance: by "understanding where, how, when and why the virus evolved and spread among us, we can surely work to prevent the next one." 21 b&w illus.
