Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

by David Quammen

During the 1930s and 1940s, the Dispensaire Antivénérien administered more than forty-seven thousand injections annually. Most were intravenous. Straight into the blood. With increased migration to the city following World War II, the numbers rose. In the early 1950s, the quackier remedies (intravenous milk?) and the metallic poisons gave way to penicillin and streptomycin, which had longer-lasting effects and therefore meant fewer shots. The campaign peaked in 1953, at about 146,800 injections, or roughly 400 per day. Many if not most of those injections were administered to femme libres, sex workers, ladies of hospitality, however you want to describe them, who had multiple male clients. They came and went. The syringes were rinsed and reused. This in a city where HIV-1 had arrived. Six years later came the blood sample that yielded the HIV-1 sequence now known as ZR59. One year after that, DRC60. The virus had spread