Article Text
Miscellaneous
Book review
The Origins of AIDS
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Jacques Pepin. Published by Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, paperback, September 2011, $17.99, pp 293, ISBN 978-0-521-18637-7; hardback, $45.00, ISBN 978-1-107-00663-8.
It would be difficult to imagine anyone better qualified than Jacques Pepin to write about the origins of AIDS. An infectious diseases specialist who worked for 4 years in a bush hospital in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), he trained in epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, has an encyclopaedic knowledge of French and Belgian colonial history, and has himself conducted groundbreaking research on the epidemiology of HIV-2 in West Africa.
This book reads like a detective story, and I found it hard to put down. Starting with the virological evidence that simian immunodeficiency virus in chimpanzees (SIVcpz) was first …
Footnotes
Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.