Jacques Peppen, an epidemiologist at the University of Shebrooke in Canada, believes that soldiers who hunted chimpanzees in Cameroon during World War I for food may be patients with AIDS zero.
The Mirror reported on January 30 that previous research believed that AIDS originated in southeastern Cameroon in the early 20th century, when ape immunodeficiency virus was transmitted from animals to people, resulting in AIDS.
According to the report, during World War I, British, Belgian and French allied forces invaded Cameroon and went deep into remote areas inland along the Congo River.
Hungry soldiers hunted wild animals for food. Some soldiers were infected with chimpanzees with ape immunodeficiency virus, thus becoming AIDS zero patients. In the early 1950s, about 500 people in Cameroon were infected with AIDS.
At that time, the main way of infection was abandoned needles in hospitals.
By the 1960s, sexual transmission had become the main infection route.
Later, a foreign technician contracted AIDS while working in Kazakhstan and returned to the Americas, and then AIDS began to spread widely.
On average, one person on earth dies of AIDS every minute. In 2019, 690,000 people died of the disease.
