What do you know about how AIDS got started? If you are neither a specialist nor one of the many Canadians directly affected by the disease, your answer will likely be couched in popular culture references: “Hmmm … Hit the headlines in the early 1980s as a rare disease in homosexuals in San Francisco. Had probably been around and started spreading a good deal earlier … Canadian flight attendant who picked it up somewhere in Africa on one of his flights—what was his name? Patient Zero, some people called him.” But was this flight attendant even important? Did he bring something from Africa, or from elsewhere? If from Africa, how did it get there, how long had it been there and how did it begin its deadly spread? These are questions that specialists have studied now for three decades, but it has taken the work of Jacques Pepin, an epidemiologist at the Université de Sherbrooke in Quebec, to lay out the full story with all its troubling implications for the way medicine operates...
David Waltner-Toews is a retired professor of epidemiology in the Department of Population Medicine at the Ontario Veterinary College in the University of Guelph, the founding president of Veterinarians without Bordersé Vétérinaires sans Frontiéres Canada and the Canadian Community of Practice in Ecosystem Approaches to Human Health. He is a specialist in the epidemiology of diseases people get from animals (zoonoses) and the author of The Chickens Fight Back: Pandemic Panics and Deadly Diseases that Jump from Animals to Humans (Greystone, 2007).
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