The sinuous route of HIV filiation in the world of simian viruses

“She screened them using tests for both SIV and HIV. Despite one possible misstep involving a lab contamination, her team found what they had thought they might: a virus intermediate between HIV and SIV. With the code unblinded, Kanki learned that the positive results came from Senegalese prostitutes. In retrospect it made sense. Prostitutes are at high risk for any sexually transmitted virus, including a new one recently spilled into humans. And the density of the rural human population in Senegal, where African green monkeys are native, makes monkey-human interactions (crop-raiding by monkeys, hunting by humans) relatively frequent.
Furthermore, the new bug from Senegalese prostitutes wasn’t just halfway between HIV and SIV. It more closely resembled SIV strains from African green monkeys than it did the Montagnier-Gallo version of HIV. That was important but puzzling. Were there two distinct kinds of HIV?
Luc Montagnier now reenters the story. Having tussled with Gallo over the first HIV discovery, he converged more amicably with Essex and Kanki on this one. Using assay tools provided by the Harvard group, Montagnier and his colleagues screened the blood of a twenty-nine-year-old man from Guinea-Bissau, a tiny country[…]”
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“The difference between HIV-2 and HIV-1 is the difference between a nasty little West African disease and a global pandemic.”


Excerpt From: David Quammen. “Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic”. Apple Books.