The Chimp and the River: How AIDS Emerged from an African Forest, David Quammen (ISBN 978-0393350845, W. W. Norton)

Another book by David Quammen that is excerpted and adapted from his book Spillover. If you already read Spillover then this book might not bring much new. I read Spillover in 2015 in unsuspecting times and then this basically long chapter from that book on AIDS in the summer of 2020 in the middle of the covid-19 pandemic while on vacation in the south of France. Reading this in the middle of a pandemic obviously made it all more tangible. Compared to Ebola which acts fast and has a high mortality rate AIDS is a slow killer, infecting people without them showing any symptoms for years. All those years these people can go on and unknowingly infect others. This has enabled AIDS to jump from a Chimpanzee to a human maybe as long as 70 years ago and then to silently spread, infecting roughly 75 million people and killing 35 million people since that day. David Quammen tells a fascinating story not only searching for the origins of AIDS but also explaining how colonial policy, blood transfusions trade with little knowledge about viruses in general and even the liberation from colonial rule all may unwittingly have helped AIDS spread first locally and then globally. Chilling but at the same time also illuminating. Reading time well spent.