Chimp & the River: How AIDS Emerged from an African Forest

by David Quammen

In this "frightening and fascinating masterpiece" (Walter Isaacson), David Quammen explores the true origins of HIV/AIDS.

The real story of AIDS—how it originated with a virus in a chimpanzee, jumped to one human, and then infected more than 60 million people—is very different from what most of us think we know. Recent research has revealed dark surprises and yielded a radically new scenario of how AIDS began and spread. Excerpted and adapted from the book Spillover, with a new introduction by the author, Quammen's hair-raising investigation tracks the virus from chimp populations in the jungles of southeastern Cameroon to laboratories across the globe, as he unravels the mysteries of when, where, and under what circumstances such a consequential "spillover" can happen. An audacious search for answers amid more than a century of data, The Chimp and the River tells the haunting tale of one of the most devastating pandemics of our time.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, History, Medicine, Africa, Biology, Medical

175 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 26, 2015

About the author

David Quammen (born February 1948) is an award-winning science, nature and travel writer whose work has appeared in publications such as National Geographic, Outside, Harper's, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times Book Review; he has also written fiction. He wrote a column called "Natural Acts" for Outside magazine for fifteen years. Quammen lives in Bozeman, Montana.

Reviews

[Charlene · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excerpt from Spillover, with no new information. So if you read Spillover, you can skip this. If you have not read Spillover, I highly recommend this book. Quammen is simply the best at writing about pandemics. He provides a rich history along with a solid scientific understanding of the virus in question. In this book, he focuses on AIDS. If you want to know about the many other incredibly interesting viruses waiting to infect people, I highly recommend Spillover. Quammen's writing style makes even a book about viruses a page turner.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

FASCINATING. It was a very short but interesting history of the origins of HIV and how it most likely spread to the global epidemic It is today.

[Sabrina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this! Some parts were an absolute page-turner, which can be tough to achieve in nonfiction. Few parts were dry, but they were there... which is the only reason I took away a star. However, overall what an awesome read to learn more about the origin of AIDS with tidbits of African culture. Author does a great job explaining things for a non-science reader without watering down the content. It was also interesting to learn how long, hard, and grueling research can be both in the field and the lab. New appreciation for scientists. I will definitely be reading more science nonfiction, but first I need a little brain break.

[Briann · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read David Quammen’s Spillover a few years back and enjoyed it. Therefore, I was excited to read The Chimp and the River. However, I did not realize that this was going to be a cut, copy, and paste from Spillover's HIV and AIDS section. I was disappointed that it did not provide any new information from what was covered in Spillover. I also wish that it provided some images or timelines to help make sense of HIV’s evolutionary history and phylogenetic tree.

[Amanda Norberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Listened to an TWIV episode where David Quammen was interviewed, and was intrigued to learn more about this author that they were talking so heartily towards.

Had a GREAT reading experience, wow! For someone who hasn’t been reading cell physiology/biology recently but find it interesting in every-day-life to listen to podcasts about viruses and reading whatever I can get, I really loved this one. The basic knowledge not to get intrigued or in need of Googleling basic terms or facts regarding virus and cells. For me, it was the smooth experience of reading a novel about something I was interested about from the first page onwards. I liked this one especially since it easily read and understood, with small tales about people and their lives combined with some hypothesis and some facts. Loved it and can’t wait to read more from this author!

[Netanella · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Simply wow.

Superb writing and a harrowing subject - the ecological origin of AIDS - made this book a riveting read for me. I wanted something different, and simply picked a winner.

The Chimp and the River: How AIDS Emerged from an African Forest is an extract from a larger book by the same author. Spillover tells of various viruses - SARS, Ebola, AIDS, and probably countless others - that have jumped species, from animal to human. Author Quammen writes about science, disease, and dense subjects with an ease that is enviable. I haven't taken a science course in at least two decades, yet I was able to follow Quammen's argument easily. He also has a sense of humor that is probably quite necessary when dealing with a subject that has caused such devastation to human (and simian) lives. I am a fan, not just of the author, but of a more serious pursuit of non-fiction reads. Thank you, Mr. Quammen.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Isn't it weird that we have a nice imagining of the chap who butchered the chimp and a nice imagining of the chap who canoed down to Leopoldville .... but we don't have it for the Haitian who visited Zaire? And the Haitian who donated plasma, the Haitian man who slept with an American man in Florida, the American who received Haitian plasma in a transfusion?

[Andres · Rating 3 out of 5]

A three star which could have been a four. Some chapters were fascinating. Others simply added for pure speculation as it will never be possible to trace back the roots of the disease.

[Erica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kind of speed read, don't ask me questions

[Mitchell Friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Basically an extract of the best chapter from Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, converted into a short book. Frightening and insightful. Sure the writing could have been a little less breezy, and pieces could have been a bit more in depth. But worth reading and understanding.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I graduated from nursing school, my first job was in New York on a medical floor beneath an inpatient HIV/AIDS unit, and we were cross trained to work both. Two of my fellow new nurses were hoping to work on the other unit due to their affinity and devotion to gay men’s rights and care. It was a time of uncertainty as the crisis and epidemic had seemed inscrutable and opaque: what was this disease, how could it be so successful and so deadly, and how could we protect the sufferers who were victimized and vilified by conservative and traditional America? The discovery of antiretroviral therapy was just around the corner; and silently and joyfully, I never had to work the AIDS unit, never had to float; had less than a half dozen “boarders” on my floor, under poorly understood trial protocols, perhaps, so I may have witnessed history in the making without even knowing as that floor was closed as unnecessary.

Even so, I had not kept up with the research, as if became less and less relevant to my work with maternal/child nursing, and we celebrated the long lives possible with the new protocols. Recently, it is emerging again in my professional life, and this book was an amazing way to understand the trajectory of this virus, this disease, even as I struggle with the sadness of ignorance and denial and sometimes, pure disregard for what it means to be human as those afflicted refuse to tell their partners and continue the cycle.

I looked into rates; the US is 24th in countries highest in HIV rates; it is higher than some African countries like Liberia, Ghana, and Ethiopia, which stunned me, and Swaziland, Lesotho, and Botswana were about 25% which means 1 in 4 have it, and it is thought to be related to sex workers and gender based violence.

I will have to do some research on the bushmeat trade in Africa, especially once people started to know that this was the origin; do they know, has that knowledge reached them? It didn’t reach me until this book, even as I did hear some things and had a wispy idea. In Africa, the author runs into a poster he contrasts with American HIV prevention posters that advocate safe sex; this poster encouraged people not to eat ape meat. In the end, it is more the handling of the meat and the procuring of it that caused the transmission, so perhaps, also, let’s encourage the end of killing chimpanzees. The research shows people are still using it as a protein source as animal husbandry is not successful or feasible, and it is a source of income for a black marker, so intricately related to survival. Ebola is thought to come from fruit bats, so a similar situation, and many people do not believe that is is transmitted that way, or need to survive and can’t believe it.

What this book says is that the first case of HIV came from a chimpanzee to to a human in a pocket in Cameroon in approximately 1908. This is called spillover, and the virus was SIV (Simian immunodeficiency virus) and it found a welcome and hospitable environment. The theory is Cut hunter transmission, where the hunter that killed the chimp had points of entry, cuts, abrasions, or such, and the animal’s blood entered into the human, who then transmitted through sexual contact.

In those early times, before globalization, villages were small and transmission was probably confined to a few sexual partners; as people travelled more and cities, especially Kinshasa in the DRC, exploded, transmission increased. The explosion in the 80’s is less well understood; there are some theories about hypodermic needles that possibly were used on thousands of patients without sterilization. They do know that Haitians travelled en masse to Zaire (now DRC) and probably were infected and brought it back to Haiti and from there to the U.S.

Other interesting facts new to me were the fact that this spillover has occurred many times in history, but the virulency of those strains, HIV-2, is less easily transmitted, vertically mom to baby or by sexual contact, so it had less power to explode. Many still associate the transmission with men having sex with men, but it seems that prostitution was the true path, and may still be in many parts of the world. Quammen gives a potential, fictional account of a man infected that brings it to the city, but it is all conjecture, and that was the only part of the book I disliked. It was a good device to bring that journey alive, but filled with unnecessary, odd details that were distracting.

[Bre Stewart · Rating 3 out of 5]

My sister chose this book for our monthly club and I'm glad I stepped out of my comfort zone to read it. For a scientist or biologist, the context is probably simple. For me - no lab, zoo or virus background, I found it to be difficult in parts. I probably wouldn't have been able to complete it without the help of my sister and explaining parts with extra detail to me [Thanks, Sabrina!].

I did love how the book challenged me to consider how important animal testing actually is and taught me a lot about how SIV, HIV and AIDS effects humans, animals and cultures differently. I thought it was so interesting how in the US we learn about AIDS by talking about safe sex and not sharing needles; but in the Congo their concern is hunting and rituals.

My favorite part was actually the fiction chapters about The Voyager and how he potentially shared HIV on it's journey down the river. I loved learning about African culture and I look forward to diving into more books on that topic in the future, other lifestyles have always fascinated me!

The story reads like a mystery and I now have a deep respect for the people who dedicate their lives to research, I didn't realize how many years it takes for them to *possibly* get answers, and there is STILL so much unknown. The author did a great job of concealing and revealing the scientists findings in the book timeline. 3/5 stars for engaging me in a topic I'd otherwise never read into!

[Alizabeth Settergren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. This was short and to the point and was packed full of information.

This sounds so terribly ignorant, but growing up, I was told that a man fucked a chimpanzee and that's how the world became infected with HIV/AIDS.
Of course, being 11(?) if that, who was I to think otherwise?

As an adult, I felt more confident that there had to be a more scientific reasoning to it, but again, why would I put anymore thought into its origins?

I saw a review for this book on Goodreads and decided shortly after that I would purchase it and I intended to educate myself further on this topic.

I'm glad I did. This is a valuable little book.

[David Msomba · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to inform yourself more about AIDS than relying on bunch of conspiracy theories,you have to read this fine work.

David Quammen,went deep to bring the evidence of patient zero,how the disease shifted from primates to humans.

I learn alot from this book,things I didn't even learn on medical school

Highly recommended.

[Shubha Shivanandappa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent writing on the nature and variants of HIV - writing is simple and is easily understandable. The books gives a very good overview on how the origins of this virus was traced - and how it became a global pandemic - HIV globalisation. Sad to read about the African wildlife exploitation even after the HIV pandemic which bought such a deadly havoc.

[Ellie Groves · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book for class and I was intrigued the whole time. There is a lot of unique story telling and imagination used in this novel to tell the story of how AIDS actually started, how did the spill-over happen and where and who and why. Super cool and a page turner honestly!

[Teresa Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super interesting, overall easy to read and understand tale of the origins of HIV. As a graduate student getting ready to defend my dissertation, it was a good refresher that made the origin story engaging and thought provoking. David Quammen is one of the greatest scientific communicators to ever write and makes disease knowledge accessible and interesting, even for non-scientists. He puts the entire pandemic into perspective beautifully. Overall great read but drags slightly at certain points where you can tell he was trying to fluff up his chapter from Spillover.

[Trey Emerson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super interesting and very well-researched.

[Margot Peer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really really interesting. Also surprisingly thrilling for being such a medical book.

[Mary Brynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic. Gripping. Easy to follow. Outstanding delineation of the history and inception of the AIDS pandemic.

[TK421 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply fascinating.

[Amber Ray · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting exploration of how AIDS arose and why. I never new it was a zoonotic disease--arising from animals. According to this book it was a minor and contained disease until circumstances permitted it to escape a small number of victims and opportunistically infect a larger pool of potential hosts. Very relatable to the Coronavirus epidemic.

[Roberta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative, but if you're planning to read - or have read - Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic you can skip it, it doesn't add any new information.

[Anna McMartin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fascinating read - non-fiction at its best. It's a quest through time and across the planet, following the factors in the development of HIV, starting with a chimp, but including colonialism, scientific misadventure, economic exploitation, cruelty to animals and humans, and after decades of latency some terrible luck. A nerdy detective story, but with a human element.

[Tony Liñan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was dumb and didn't read the cover jacket to realize this was an excerpt from his previous book Spillover, so it was sort of a re-read for me. To me it reads like a crime novel, tracing the roots of crossover into humans. If you haven't read Spillover, would recommend that over this book.

[Elizabeth]

As seen on Science Book a Day: http://sciencebookaday.com/2015/08/03...

[E. C. Koch · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think the most academically demanding course I took as an undergraduate was called Queer Theory. There were a lot of things that made Dr. Harris' class tough, the most immediate of which was, naturally, the steady diet of theoretical texts - I'm talking Butler, Sedgwick, Foucault, Hall, and Warner - that framed the semester's discourse. But then, surrounding it all, was also this deeper issue I was made to come to grips with, which might tritely be called the Gay Experience. Now, obviously queerness isn't a monolithic entity any more than blackness is; I'm not trying to reduce this complexity down to an essentialized, singular anything. What I mean by Gay Experience is something more like the persistent, tenuous quality of being Other. Whatever experiences I had had of being an outsider, of choosing to be an outsider, was shown to me to have been just that, a choice, meaning that I was unaccountably privileged, and so some vestige of that course that lingers still within me is an affinity and sympathy for my queer compatriots and a recognition of my privilege that has manifested in an interest in AIDS. So when the book And the Band Played On was recommended, I read it. Voraciously. And Shilts' account of the AIDS crisis has conditioned my thinking about AIDS for the last ten years. Shilts' book is brilliant and thorough and a monument to journalistic objectivity (Shilts elected to wait to find out about the results of his own AIDS test until after the book was done. Shilts had AIDS and died). It also, we can say by virtue of historical perspective, has flaws. The first flaw is that Shilts casts Gaetan Dugas as the villain of the AIDS crisis. This guy Dugas was a flight attendant who, as you can imagine, got around. He gladly made use of the bathhouses that were then popular and by his own account had had over twenty-five hundred sexual partners. He also, Shilts reports, willfully infected partners with HIV after he knew he had tested positive, and when an early epidemiological study was conducted to try and locate the common factor connecting HIV's proliferation in cities across North America, Dugas was identified as the now-notorious Patient Zero. This leads to the second flaw of Shilts' book, namely that the AIDS epidemic had an identifiable first infected person. Correcting these flaws is where Quammen's booklet comes in. Quammen catches the reader up on the scientific discoveries and conversation that has transpired since And the Band Played On was published in 1987. The Chimp and the River, then, advances the current best hypothesis that HIV was transferred to humans through chimps (which chimps got it from monkeys), and that this transfer occurred in a corner of Cameroon as early as 1908 where it barely survived in the human population until industrial-scale hypodermic immunizations became possible in west Africa before the jet age made intercontinental travel prevalent before Gaetan Dugas first boarded an airplane before it became a global scourge. Quammen's booklet doesn't back away from technical discussions of epidemiology and the intricacies of professional scientific publications. He also allows himself to imagine and present the narrativization of the Cut Hunter, the real, anonymous patient zero, who became infected with SIV, adapted it to HIV, and brought it to Brazzaville. Together, these parts of Quammen's booklet make this as informative as it is enjoyable (and in the process, absolves Dugas from some of his undo villainy). I might still recommend And the Band Played On first, but then I'd tell you to read this right after.

[Deb Omnivorous Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a marvellous little non fiction book. What mostly sold me on this one (I swear, I was not looking for more books in that op shop, it just happened....) was the author. I have never read anything my David Quammen that I did not enjoy, his particular way of combining science and history and the human element is always excellent. The smooth, excellent writing style reaffirms my fondness for the English language and is a dying art. As is the ability to something exciting without overdramatising and complex without dumbing it down to a glassy magazine article level. Match all this with his skill in taking a HUGE amount of information and making it into a concise, linear narrative and you always have a book I enjoy, regardless of the subject.

The subject here however is also fascinating. The emergence of AIDS and the affect it left on the world have become (I am told) especially relevant to the younger generations who cannot remember the terror of the fatal disease of Aids back in the day. This book talks about the emergence and it has a lot that I knew, but has not read as a consistent story. There were a few revelations toward the end that I had never heard of and it also has a couple of points that are very relevant to today.

Copyrighted in 2012, long before Covid-19 it starts with talking about how the world first became aware of the disease in the 80's. But the parts I was most fascinated by were the descriptions of zoonotic disease and the molecular cladistics that scientists used to trace it's origins. I was also charmed but the small, perfectly written, descriptions of histology in the detective work; I have worked in histology for over two decades, it is rare that our tiny role in science is ever mentioned.

In the introduction, Quammem talks about zoonotic diseases; those diseases which come from animals, and then enter the human population (in a number of ways) in a process called Spillover, it also talks about their importance to the entire world and their ability to cause pandemics. The introduction concludes with the paragraph "Given the limited scope and peculiarities of such problems, why should people around the rest of the world concern themselves with the subject of zoonotic disease?" Hello Covid-19 in spilling over in a Chinese meat market, emerging on a global scale in 2019. This is practically prophetic; only the good type of prophet, the scientist and the historian type.

While the relevance of this book to Covid was rather staggering, the chief pleasure of reading it lay elsewhere. The meticulous (though huge) amount of effort that has gone into tracing the entry of the virus from monkeys in Africa into the Chimpanzee population, then from Chimpanzees to a human (estimated to be in 1908) and then the slow persistence in the population before it became a pandemic. It is like reading the most fascinating of detective stories, beautifully written. There are a couple of really sad stories in their too, the story of the guy who looks like he was the father of the antivaxer movement (though the author takes a very hand off approach to him), the ways in which modern medicine, with the best intentions, unknowingly helped a disease proliferate. Ignorance is not bliss, it is just ignorance and leads to suffering.

In any case, a brilliant little book, with masses of matriculate research having gone in to it and beautifully written. Deserves a far better review than I have time to write. Maybe next time, when I re-read it.

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Quammen's "The Chimp and the River" delves into the gripping story of HIV/AIDS, tracing its origins from the jungles and rivers of Africa to its devastating global impact. David Quammen’s book is a medical history and biologic dissection of HIV/AIDS. He interviews different researchers that have yielded valuable insights about the disease as well as examine other suspect viral sequences that may yield clues about HIV/AIDS. While Quammen discusses parts of the HIV/AIDS story in "Spillover," this section stands alone as a meticulous exploration of a disease detective story. Through his enthralling writing, blending scientific details with suspenseful storytelling, he takes the readers down the rivers of Cameroon—towards the origins of HIV/AIDS.

Quammen pieces the HIV jigsaw together by exploring the ecological puzzle pieces that contributed to the first zoonotic event (aka “spillover”) as well as the different forms of HIV/AIDS. He dismisses the red herring of how Gaetan Dugas, commonly known as patient zero for HIV/AIDS, is not the true patient zero. The true patient zero is most likely a cut-hunter from Africa. He also clarifies how there are different types of HIV in humans, HIV-1 and HIV-2, and how even within these two types, there are many groups within them. HIV-1, group M, is the only one that causes global pandemics. He also discusses simian immunodeficiency viruses (SIV), found in many different primate species, and how the study of SIV contributes to cracking the case on HIV/AIDS.

Though Quammen doe incredible investigative work putting together the HIV/AIDS case file, his fictionalized account of the individual who may have been the first human carrier felt distracting. This fictionalized section weakened the overall strength of the book and broke Quammen’s natural cadence.

However, overall, the Chimp and the River" is a compelling and informative read. His writing is palpable for those with or without a background in science. Anyone reading Quammen’s book will surely walk away with a deeper understanding of the dreadful deadly disease thanks to Quammen’s superb sleuth work.

[Ubah Khasimuddin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting book giving a thesis on where and how the AIDS virus came about. A short read, this book is thick with lots of details that a non-biologist or health science professional (like myself) might find very hard to understand. This is why I gave the book only two stars, while parts were fascinating and easily readable to the lay person, much of the detail was above my head.
I just wanted a story with simple to understand points, probably would have been better if I had just picked up the magazine article that this book was spun out of; that was probably more for the every day man.
Sadly I still can't say I completely understand how the AIDS epidemic exploded, I got how it came down the river from a village man who probably got it from a cut on his hand/arm and butchering an infected chimp or ape. This was in the early 1900's and than I understood how it exploded in the 1970's and 1980's. My take from the book was that needles spread the disease as nurses and health facilities used the same needle over and over again. Also I got how Haitians went over to the Congo to help set the country up after independence and one of them probably brought AIDS over to the Western Hemisphere and through the widespread use of buying blood plasma for use in the USA it spread. But I still couldn't figure out why the disease was dormant from the 1950's till exploding in the 1980's?
Yet, this is an interesting book, would recommend for those interested in the subject, might make a good book to read for a college course.