What conditions may have facilitated the jump of the virus responsible for AIDS to humans near Lake Victoria?
Answers
There were several factors that most attribute to the move of a simian only virus to a virulent strain for humans. One of those factors was that the infected monkeys did not originate in Africa, but were shipped by a monkey trading company out of Germany. They were supposedly euthanizing the diseased animals, and yet, some were obviously still infected. In the Hot Zone, Preston was told via an interview with some of those workers that the monkeys were not put down, but rather were shipped to a small island just off of Lake Victoria ( to be used as backups of the other monkey shipments were bad). The high concentration of infected primates, living in fairly close proximity to humans most likely gave the virus enough access to the human genome in order to make a change in its makeup.