THE HISTORY AND ORIGIN OF HIV/AIDS:

AN ANALYSIS OF THE BOOK, "THE CHIMP AND THE RIVER" by DAVID QUAMMEN

Being a gay man, I have always had a fascination with AIDS: the epidemic that hit the gay communities in the late seventies, the stories of the heroes and villains that came out of it and the sociopolitical movement it help push forward that humanized the LGBT community. AIDS, or acquired immune deficiency syndrome is caused by the HIV virus, this is widely known knowledge but what isn’t widely known and what wasn’t officially known until about 2007 was the origin of the virus, one that has killed over 39 million people worldwide.

What makes AIDS/HIV so socially and politically charged, especially in the U.S., is its connection and relevance to the male homosexual communities of mainly San Francisco, New York City and Miami when the virus was identified and labeled in the early 1980s. Since its “birth” into the public eye, the virus has been plagued by many misconceptions and slanderous accusations such as: being labeled by politicians and religious people as a curse on the gay community for being homosexuals, how the virus is transmitted, and the infamous “patient zero”. These myths and lies, while some being respectively reactionary to a deadly virus, have caused a lot of grief, rejection, prejudice and ignorance that have affected many people involved with the virus. The sad reality is the fact that ignorance, led by the socially and politically charged lies, to this day masks the reality about AIDS and the HIV virus.

The reality is that since its appearance in the gay communities in the late 1970s, scores of doctors, virologists, biologists, phylogeneticists etc… have meticulously studied the HIV virus and leaned not only the way it attacks the cells of the body but the origin and nature of the virus. In David Quammen’s book, “The Chimp and the River”, Quammen tells the history of AIDS/HIV virus, from how it was identified to the origin of the virus itself. This book brings to light the realities of the virus, information that could have toppled the hurtful lies about the virus and saved many people in the process. 

The book focuses on three main scientific points of the virus: First, the early days of identifying the virus, second, the different mutations of the virus and where they come from, and finally the actual origin of the virus. The book starts with the scientists Michael Gottlieb and Alvin Friedman-Kien, Dr. Gottlieb was an assistant professor at the UCLA Medical Center in California while Dr. Kien was a dermatologist in New York. At roughly the same time, about a month apart, these doctors noticed a strange pattern of infections in a handful of their patients, infections that should normally and easily be fought off by any healthy adult. All of the patients were homosexual men and over the next six months died. Further cases spread up over the next few years and a few teams of doctors raced to identify the cause of these deaths. The book states that in the early 80s there was only one known human retrovirus called human T-cell leukemia virus (HTLV) and many raced off in that direction. As a result, the virus was wrongfully identified as HTLV-III/LAV because scientists thought it was another strand of HTLV. It wasn’t until 1983 that the virus was labeled as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and identified as the virus that cause AIDS, which was itself identified the year before.

Once the virus was labeled, scientists quickly realized that there were two main groups of the HIV virus (HIV-1 and HIV-2 respectively) and that these groups had multiple strands of the virus, all slightly different from each other. They also realized that HIV was very similar to SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus) the retrovirus found in many species of primates. Like HIV, SIV has multiple strands or groups that infect different primates. Quammen (the author) explains how the different subdivisions of HIV and SIV were discovered and how they are related to each other.  HIV-1 is the more virulent (aggressive and lethal) virus and contains 4 different subgroups: M, N, O and P. Groups M-O come from the SIVcpz that is in chimpanzees, whereas group P (which was identified recently) comes from the SIV in gorillas. On the other hand, the HIV-2 group is less lethal and virulent but contains the first subgroup to be both identified and connected to SIV. The subgroups are labeled A - H and resemble the SIVsm found in sooty mangabey monkeys.

While the different subgroups of viruses were being identified, other scientists were trying to figure out how the HIV virus came to be, how it crossed over from a primate to a human (called spillover) and then spread throughout the world. As stated in the previous paragraph, the group HIV-1 is the group that contains the strand of virus that caused the AIDS epidemic we all know about. The subgroup is labeled as HIV-1 group M (for “Main”) without this group, there would be no epidemic and millions of deaths. Quammen explains that scientists looked at two important factors to find the origin of the virus. First were the mutations of the virus’ DNA that happen in DNA replication that they took from samples of infected people and primates. Looking at the number of mutations tells the scientists how long the virus has been in a host; the more mutations the longer the virus has been in a host. Second, was the ability to compare the HIV-1 M virus to the SIVcpz found in chimpanzees, when scientists had identified that the HIV-1 M virus came from chimpanzees they set out to find what tribe of chimps had the virus first. Using feces of chimps and a lot of trekking through African jungles, a group of scientists lead by Beatrice Hahn located the geographical origin of the whole pandemic by finding a tribe of chimps with the most mutated SIVcpz that infallibly resembled HIV-1 M, and that was Southeastern Cameroon. 

The boom goes on to explain how even SIV came to be and then fictionally accounts how the first bushman got infected while cutting up an infected chimp in Cameroon through a cut on his hand and then slowly spread it throughout the world. Through the DNA mutation analysis, scientists believe that this man was infected as early as 1908 and say it is soundly accurate, give or take a couple years. I truly loved this book, AIDS was and still is an epidemic that plagues our world and has affected many people in the LGBT culture that I heartily identify with. I have seen the effects of AIDS and even watched as someone was told they have tested positive for HIV. The knowledge that this book contains makes the virus that less scary, less of an unidentified monster lurking in the dark and I wish that these scientific facts could have been identified sooner than 2007 because I feel this knowledge would have softened the pain of many men and women and lessen the guilt and stigma that comes with being HIV+.

Written by Cory Martin