Out Of Africa

A couple of items in the news lately:

     (1)   Analysis of tissues preserved by doctors in the colonial-era Belgian Congo shows that the most pervasive strain of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) began spreading among humans at some point between 1884 and 1924...

            The virus spread only very slowly at first but got a vital foothold thanks to urbanisation during the colonial era....It was transmitted through sex [prostitution] and then was taken farther afield through commerce.

             There are several theories that seek to explain how SIV entered humans....An infected chimpanzee bit a human, or a SIV-infected ape was butchered and sold for bushmeat* [WTF? my italics], and the virus entered the bloodstream through tiny cuts in the hand, according to these hypotheses.

     (2)   The World Health Organization has announced that a hitherto unknown viral haemorragic fever caused by a Ribonucleic Acid (RNA) virus has killed three people in Johannesburg, South Africa.  The first person to have died from the disease on September 13th (a female tour guide) [?] had become sick while in Zambia, and had afterwards been evacuated to South Africa.  The other two people who died of the unknown virus were a paramedic and a nurse, both of whom had treated the tour guide...It is said that infection can only occur through contacted with the blood, urine, or faeces of an infected victim.  

      A fourth, possible, victim of the new viral disease, Maria Mokubung, a cleaning woman at the hospital where the first three victims died, who had already been sick of another, unrelated disease, and whose contact with any of the previous victims is uncertain, was nonetheless buried as a potential victim of the new disease:  The coffin, covered in thick white plastic, remained in the hearse, while the bier where the coffin would in normal circumstances have been displayed, was draped in white and adorned with wreaths.  So careful were officials and undertakers to prevent possible contamination, that Mokibung's relatives were unable to perform the usual burial rite of bathing and dressing the body....

       The hearse was eventually opened at the cemetery and the coffin removed.  Seeing the plastic-sealed coffin for the first time, Mokubung's relatives screamed and wept.  Mokubung's eldest daughter, Lebohang, handed a thick colorful blanket to an undertaker who draped it over the coffin, which was then lowered into the ground.

       Lebohand dropped to the ground as she and two of her siblings tossed earth onto the coffin.

*  Bushmeat  = (calque from the French viande de brousse) the term commonly used for meat of terrestrial wild animals, killed for subsistence or commercial purposes throughout the humid tropics of the Americas, Asia, and Africa. However, originally the term was only used to describe the hunting of wild animals in West and Central Africa.  Oh my fucking god.