David Quammen, author of the book, The Chip and The River:How AIDS Emerged from an African Forest, reports his version of the history of AIDS virus.
In Cameroon around the year 1908, a hunter became infected with blood from a chimpanzee and was the first known person to catch the disease. Quammen claims that the hunter infected others through sex – and the virus travelled via the Congo to Haiti in the 50s. The virus may have actually reached the U.S. in 1969, via Haiti – but was not diagnosed until 1981, when a study on young gay men with pneumonia identified the syndrome.
He writes ‘It reached drug addicts through shared needles. It reached gay men… by sexual transmission, possibly from an initial contact between two males, an American and a Haitian.’ This is in sync with the obseravtions of many authors who have reported their versions of AIDS history.
Quammen has supported the natural transfer theory (also called 'Hunter Theory' or 'Bushmeat Theory'), the "simplest and most plausible explanation for the cross-species transmission" of Simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) or Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) (post mutation), where the virus was transmitted from an ape or monkey to a human when a hunter or bushmeat vendor/handler was bitten or cut while hunting or butchering the animal. He too has discarded the idea of Gaëtan Dugas being the patient zero (patient 0).
