Maybe some European projects? But I guess we will keep sending Tshirts and cheaper milk instead to further undermine African local economies.
Maybe some European projects? But I guess we will keep sending Tshirts and cheaper milk instead to further undermine African local economies.
AID to Africa has largely has been an unintended yet sad disaster. The best example of this is when the British were leaving East Africa in the 1960's they, reasonably, decided to administer the polio vaccine widely. Likely this massively furthered the spread of AIDS, which is thought to have crossed from monkeys to humans sometime in the early 1950s.
[1] - https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n07/edward-hooper/aids-a...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPV_AIDS_conspiracy_theory
You can still find articles seeming to espouse the hypothesis on several sites, but from what I've seen they are all quite old and poorly sourced, with no follow up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_HIV/AIDS
For the most part the consensus agrees that the colonial period in Africa likely induced conditions that caused SIV to develop into HIV, and likely more than once.
Humans can get infected with SIV albeit they don’t develop AIDS from it and their viral load drops quite rapidly which makes purely sexual transmission unlikely. SIV has been known to be quite effective at jumping species through serial transmission during the acute phases with as little as 3 hosts needed until it can effectively infect other species however direct SIV to HIV evolution has never been observed.
So for the most part while HIV has likely emerged in the late 19th century the colonial era which introduced urbanization, increase in trade, slave labor conditions, GUD causing STIs and mass injection campaigns is what pushed HIV’s pandemic emergence.
That said it’s not clear what would’ve have happened if these conditions weren’t present or simply delayed HIV might still have emerged through globalization and the general conditions set by the latter half of the 20th century.
Ironically the emergence of HIV and AIDS in the west has been instrumental in pushing viral epidemiology research and the development of antiviral treatments and protocols to the front stage and between the late 80’s and early 2000’s huge progress and advancements have been made.
I personally believe that without a viral disease that can and does infect the rich and the powerful which causes them to slowly die over decades while drastically effecting their quality of life, life style and mental health we might have been 2 decades behind on viral research compared to today if not more.