A new book has claimed that AIDS virus first began in 1908 in south-east Cameroon.
A hunter became infected with blood from a chimpanzee and was the first known person to catch the disease, the Daily Star reported.
But it took more than 60 years before the killer virus spread to the US when infected blood used in transfusions was imported from Haiti.
Author David Quammen claimed in The Chimp and the River: How Aids Emerged from an African Rain Forest that the disease lurked in the US for almost a decade before it was recognized in 1981.
