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The deadly AIDS virus began after a hunter became infected with blood from a chimpanzee that was carrying the disease as far back as 1908, according to a new book.

The hunter was wounded while tracking the chimp in south east Cameroon and was the first known person to have the disease.

But it took more than 60 years before the killer virus first spread to the US when infected blood used in transfusions was imported from Haiti.

It had been widely thought that a Canadian flight attendant called Gaetan Dugas was responsible for the spread of AIDS in America.

His extensive travel and large number of gay partners led him to being labeled ‘Patient Zero” who was responsible for bringing the disease to the US.

Doctors in San Francisco were first to notice the spread of flu like symptoms among homosexuals in the city that led to a number of deaths.

By the end of the decade more than 60,000 people in the US had died and the disease rapidly spread to the UK and Europe.

But far from being a modern disease a new book claims AIDS was already around at the turn of the 20th century in Africa.

A small number of people had the disease, but due to primitive medical knowledge in the African sub continent, it was not recognised.

From 1920-1960 it was confined to Africa where life expectancy wasn’t high and many people died from other diseases.

AIDS spread to Haiti where in 1969 a blood donation clinic run by a Miami based investor was responsible for the widespread use of the virus that in the last 35 years has killed 39 million people.

The virus was already present in a few women living in slums in the Haiti capital Port-au-Prince when they were offered $3 to donate blood.

Shared needles increased the rate of infection and the blood was later shipped to America where it was used in transfusions.

Author David Quammen claims in his book “ The Chimp and the River: How AIDS emerged from an African Rain Forest” the disease lurked in the US for almost a decade before it was recognised in 1981 as a life threatening disease.

He writes:” It reached hemophiliacs through the blood supply. It reached drug addicts through shared needles. It reached gay men...by sexual transmission possibly from initial contact between two males, an American and a Haitian.”

The virus quickly spread among the gay community claiming millions of lives

with actor Rock Hudson among the most high profile deaths.