![]() Some have rightly drawn attention to mass inoculation campaigns in the European colonies of Africa, directed at sleeping sickness, bubonic plague, smallpox, and other diseases, when European doctors used sometimes unsterile needles to vaccinate tens of thousands of Africans. 3 Because chimpanzees, monkeys, and possibly gorillas have transmitted SIVs to humans on multiple occasions without leading to epidemics, medical historians and biomedical researchers have sought factors that facilitated the epidemic spread of different strains of HIV in roughly the same time period-the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. ![]() Similarly, HIV-1O, a separate strain, emerged sometime between 18 in West-Central Africa. 2 The most virulent is HIV type 1 group M (HIV-1M) that began with an SIV that likely jumped from chimpanzees to humans in Southeast Cameroon between 19. 1 According to virological research, several strains of HIV originated in West-Central Africa sometime in the early twentieth century, most likely in the equatorial rainforests. Recent histories assert that the likely time and place for the emergence of epidemic strains of HIV from Simian immunodeficiency viruses (SIV) was in interwar Central Africa. This research is of interest as a possible early pathway for the epidemic spread of HIV and other zoonoses in Africa and the world, which biomedical researchers have identified as emerging in West-Central Africa sometime around the turn of the twentieth century. While research in German colonies is highlighted here, this was a transnational medical culture that crossed borders and oceans. Medical researchers moreover experimented with blood serum therapies on human and animal subjects in Europe and Africa, injecting blood of different species, “races” and ethnicities into others to demonstrate parasite transmissibility and to discover vaccines for diseases such as malaria, sleeping sickness, and yellow fever. ![]() ![]() ![]() This first case of blood transfusion in Africa, in which an African's blood was transfused into a German official, complicates the dominant narrative that blood transfusions in Africa came only after World War I. From about 1880 to 1920, a culture of medical experimentation promoted blood transfusion as a therapy for severe anemia in Europe, which was applied in German East Africa in 1892 for a case of blackwater fever, a complication of malaria afflicting mainly Europeans. ![]()
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