One man in southeastern Cameroon is infected. “If the spillover occurred there,” I asked Hahn, “how was it that the epidemic began in Kinshasa?” “Well, there are lots of rivers going down from that region to Kinshasa,” she said. “And the speculation, the hypothesis, is that is how the virus traveled—in people, not in apes. It wasn’t the apes that got into the canoe for a little visit of Kinshasa. It was the people who carried the virus down, most likely.” Sure, she acknowledged, there was a slim chance that someone might have brought a live chimp, captive, infected, all the way down from the
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