HIV Took Root in the 1920s in Kinshasa

A new genetic history of HIV shows how the pandemic almost certainly took root in the 1920s in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, reveal researchers. Assisted by train transport and the sex trade, the virus that causes AIDS then spread across the continent and eventually the world, infecting some 75 million people and killing 36 million of them. An international team of researchers reconstructed the genetic history of the HIV-1 group M pandemic, ...