Prevention is the mission of the field researchers at the Cremer Institute in Cameroon. They want to discover pathogens before they can spread to humans.

The four specialists, rattled by a long drive on brick roads, look out of the dusty windows of the off-road vehicle into the dense forest. It is not the first time that the small Cremer team (Center for Research on Emerging and Re-Emerging Diseases, a research institute for emerging infectious diseases) is doing research in this remote region of Cameroon. For a decade, from 2005 to 2015, the researchers were on the trail of the origins of the HI virus in the southern border region of the Central African country. What they found rewrote the history of the pandemic that is still officially active alongside Covid-19 – the history of AIDS.