Early Spread of AIDS Traced to Congo's Expanding Transportation Network
In the 1960s AIDS spread rapidly across the Congo, riding a wave of social change as the region developed and its transportation network expanded.
As the Ebola epidemic spreads, new information has emerged on the origins of a far more deadly killer. A new family history of the HIV virus that causes AIDS, reported Thursday, is troubling but instructive: Modernization in mid-20th-century Africa, especially in the city Kinshasa, played a profound role in shaping that global epidemic.
Ebola and HIV are spread in different ways—Ebola via direct contact and HIV mainly through sexual contact—and could take different paths as epidemics. But the new study, which illuminates the origins of the AIDS crisis, highlights the importance of understanding the social forces that drive epidemics as well as the mechanics of viral transmission.
"How the [HIV] virus first got from other species into humans has been studied in
