msnbc.com: "Because the villagers who first caught HIV would be long dead today, Pepin decided to use the less-deadly hepatitis C virus as well as another blood-borne virus (human T cell lymphotropic virus 1, or HTLV-1) as models for how HIV could have been inadvertently transmitted by the French colonial doctors treating sleeping sickness.
"What they found was striking: if a person had been treated for the sleeping disease before 1951, the chances that he or she had been infected with hepatitis C tripled. And HTLV-1 showed a similar pattern.
"'What happened is that for a long time, the needles and syringes used to administer the intravenous drugs were not single-use,' Pepin told Reuters Health. 'There were a lot of patients and not a lot of needles, so the sterilization of needles was not very efficient.'
"'If HIV was present in one of these patients 50 years ago, we can assume that they probably transmitted HIV,' he said. 'It is exactly like intravenous drug users who share needles.'
"According to Pepin, that would also explain why the number of people 65 years and older who'd been treated for sleeping sickness was six times lower than would be expected from historical data: the missing seniors could have died of AIDS, the immune system breakdown caused by HIV."
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