For years, researchers have tried to pinpoint the origins of the HIV pandemic that is responsible for around 36 million deaths worldwide. Now, an international research team says they have found the answer; it began in Kinshasa – what is now the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo – in the 1920s.

Share on Pinterest “Our genetic data tells us that HIV very quickly spread across the DRC, traveling with people along railways and waterways to reach Mbuji-Mayi and Lubumbashi in the extreme South and Kisangani in the far North by the end of the 1930s and early 1950s,” says Dr. Nuno Faria.

Image credit: KU Leuven



The research team, led by investigators from the University of Oxford in the UK and the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium, publish their findings in the journal Science.

HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) was first described more than 30 years ago. To date, almost 75 million people around the globe have been infected with the virus. Sub-Saharan Africa is the most severely affected, with almost 1 in 20 adults infected with HIV.

According to the researchers, it is well established that HIV has been transmitted from primates and apes to humans at least 13 times.

They note, however, that only one of these transmissions – involving the strain HIV-1 group M – led to the pandemic we know today. But where and when did this pandemic begin?

Senior author Prof. Oliver Pybus, of the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, says that the majority of HIV studies have used a “piecemeal approach” to determine the genetic history of HIV, analyzing specific HIV genomes from certain locations. But he and his colleagues decided to take a different approach.

“For the first time we have analyzed all the available evidence using the latest phylogeographic techniques, which enable us to statistically estimate where a virus comes from,” Prof. Pybus explains. “This means we can say with a high degree of certainty where and when the HIV pandemic originated.”

Using these techniques, the team traced the origins of the HIV pandemic back to Kinshasa – formerly known as Léopoldville – in the 1920s. Located on the Congo River, Kinshasa is now the largest city and the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Prof. Pybus says they then identified a number of factors that created a “perfect storm” for HIV to spread from Kinshasa to Sub-Saharan Africa between the 1920s and 1950s.

“Once the pandemic’s spatiotemporal origins were clear, they could be compared with historical data and it became evident that the early spread of HIV-1 from Kinshasa to other population centers followed predictable patterns,” says senior author Prof. Phillippe Lemey, of the Raga Institute at the University of Leuven.