I recently thought of a new theory for certain global pandemics. There have been several great world pandemics. There were two pandemics of the illness they called Plague, in the 1300s and again in the 1600s. The other two great pandemics have been Syphilis, which started at the end of the 1400s and beginning of the 1500s, and the AIDS pandemic, which began in the late 1970s. My theoretic model involves the letter two, syphilis and AIDS. The curious fact about both of these is that the island of Haiti (known as Hispanola in Columbus' time when syphilis began) has been associated with the onset of both syphilis and AIDS (although the two pandemics were separated by about 485 years.) It is generally agreed by the medical history experts that syphilis got started after Columbus' crewmen traveled with him to Hispanola, then, after returning to Europe, they got involved in a regional war at Naples, Italy. Syphilis began spreading from Naples around 1500, and was unknown previous to that. Here is the curious part: AIDS began 485 years later in association with groups of "bathhouse" highly-promiscuous sexual deviants who were frequenting Haiti as their most popular vacation spot. AIDS then appeared in New York, San Francisco, Haiti (and the Congo, but that's a slightly different issue although related indirectly) Only later did AIDS spread to other parts of the world. I think there is a common pathway for both syphilis and AIDS, involving very-old occult practices on that island including voodoo. My model is that Haitian natives (originally Caribe Indian natives, but much later with SIDS, negro natives of Haiti who were continuing ancient occult practices there) were using monkeys as a source of food. It is generally agreed by experts that the precursor of the AIDS virus was a monkey virus. The model goes as follows: First, there is a very long-entrenched native custom of eating monkey meat. Any "bugs inside the monkeys such as syphilis bacteria or pre-AIDS-virus was eaten at the same time, but the natives never developed the serious disease because they had a native immunity to the bugs. First, the pregnant mother's antibodies protect the unborn fetus by crossing the placenta into the fetus from the maternal circulation. Then, after birth, the infants gradually replace this "passive immunity" to syphilis or AIDS with an "active immunity" by developing their own antibodies by eating monkey meat themselves. Thus the natives never got the diseases. But when sailors from Europe, or vacationing Americans, went to Haiti and exposed themselves to the native virus by contacting the natives, the visitors lacked the natural immunity to the bugs, which then unleashed severe disease effects on the visitors who lacked the native immunity to the bugs. (As far as AIDS spreading to the Congo also early-on, that would be related only indirectly to this model. The idea there would be that once AIDS mutated from a mostly-harmless native virus into a hugely-mutative new viral disease, the natives of Haiti and Africa who previously had been immune to it because of eating monkey meat, now were subject to the serious disease themselves, because the new forms of the virus were so different that previous immune antibodies no longer were effective in fighting the virus.) -This model of syphilis/AIDS makes a lot of sense to me and personally I think it's right.

There is one more theoretic point I failed to mention in my thread intro posting. The type of monkey believed to harbor the virus that led to human AIDS virus is the chimpanzee, and chimps are only native to Africa, not Haiti or elsewhere. But this fact still could be consistent with the above theoretic model, because it is very likely a shared subculture exists between practitioners of Haitian occultism, icluding voodoo, and the Congo. Voodoo exists in Africa and Haiti, so it's reasonable to think that the Americans who contacted native people in Haiti in the 1970s were meeting people who had been to Africa and especially people who were practicing native occultism (due to the commonalities between Haitian and African voodoo subcultures.)

The theory you refer to was put forth in a book by an Englishman Edward Hooper, "The River." That theory was refuted by the medical Establishment mainly because there exists evidence froma few cases that single isolated cases of AIDS occurred in the 1930s or earlier. If the Polio researchers had caused AIDS in the 1950s, the earlier cases could not have occurred. The Hooper theory focuses only on the Congo and ignores the evidence about early AIDS epidemics in New York, San Francisco, and Haiti. Hooper is not a medical doctor but his theory got a lot of publicity from the cable TV channel "Sundance" with a "documentary" they keep running from time to time.

As an extension of this theoretic model of pandemics, I could propose that the other pandemics (besides syphilis and AIDS) were brought on by similar mechanisms. The 1918 swine flu epidemic could have been due to swine eating corpses in World War One battlefields in France, then people eating the swine so that the flu virus got acclimated to both species (humans and pigs.) Similarly again, the two great plague epidemics could have been due to medieval street people eating rat meat, and then rats eating uninterred human corpses.

So few posts is disappointing, even disillusioning. Isn't there a medical scientist or two out there with some dialogue on this model of historical pandemics?