HIV-1 group M, the type of HIV that originated in the colony (Belgian Congo), is responsible for about 90 percent of all infections, while HIV-1 group O, another type of HIV originating nearby is still quietly confined to West Africa. Thereby suggesting it may have been the opportunities, and not the function, of that disease that enabled it to roar globally.
“Ecological rather than evolutionary factors drove its rapid spread,” says Nuno Faria at the University of Oxford in the UK, in an interview with the BBC.
via Scientists just discovered where HIV began – ScienceAlert.