The Chimp And The River: How AIDS Emerged From An African Forest - Plot & Excerpts
It explodes out of Léopoldville like an infectious starburst. I won’t try to trace those diverging trajectories—a task for ten other books, with purposes different from mine—but I’ll sketch the pattern, then focus briefly on one that’s especially notorious. During its decades of inconspicuous transmission in Léopoldville, the virus continued to mutate (and probably also to recombine, mixing larger sections of genome from one virion to another), and those copying errors drove its diversification. Most mutations are insignificant changes, or else fatal mistakes, bringing the mutant to a dead end, but with so many billions of virions replicating, chance did provide a small, rich supply of viable new variants. The campaigns of injectable drug treatments, at the Dispensaire Antivénérien and elsewhere, may have helped foster this process by transmitting the virus quickly into more human hosts and increasing its total population. The more virions, the more mutations; the more mutations, the more diversity.
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