The Origins of AIDS by Pepin

Author:Pepin [Pepin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781139126267
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011-07-27T03:00:00+00:00

A network

As reviewed in Chapter 4, it was suggested that the Stanleyville public health laboratory played a role in the emergence of HIV-1, a hypothesis subsequently disproved. But could other Congolese laboratories have manipulated blood, serum or tissues in a way that would have facilitated the transmission of the virus?

In Léopoldville, a small laboratory set up in 1899 during the EIC period provided diagnostic assays not available elsewhere. The scope of tests gradually expanded: initially only the microscopic examination of stained or unstained specimens, then serology, followed by bacteriological cultures and, in the 1950s, haematological and biochemical assays and even viral cultures. From its early days, the Léopoldville laboratory conducted clinical research on sleeping sickness and experimented with a long list of candidate drugs. With Louise Pearce, a visiting American scientist (always referred to as Miss Pearce rather than Dr Pearce, her unmarried status apparently being more important than her degrees!), starting in 1920 the laboratory carried out the trials that ultimately documented the efficacy of tryparsamide in late-stage sleeping sickness, a major step forward in the treatment of this dreaded disease. The laboratory became a respected world-class research institution with seven Belgian MDs, three biologists, sixteen expatriate laboratory technicians and twenty-five Congolese nurses or medical assistants. In 1937, it moved to a site adjacent to the Hôpital des Noirs and became known as the Princess Astrid Institute of Tropical Medicine (literally, the companion institution of the Prince Leopold Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp). An annex was built to house a sleeping sickness laboratory where trypanosomes could be cultured (very few laboratories could do that at the time, or even today) and tsetse flies bred for experiments on animal models. Some experiments were conducted on monkeys (Cercopithecus and Cercocebus). A few autopsies were conducted on chimpanzees to look for filariasis, and a single chimpanzee seems to have been inoculated with trypanosomes, but these are the only documented cases of work on apes during more than fifty years of operations. By a strange twist of fate, fifty years later the conference centre of the Léo laboratory would become the site for Projet Sida, the heart of HIV research in Africa in the 1980s.24–29

The laboratory prepared vaccines against multiple pathogens: the pneumococcus, gonococcus, meningococcus, staphylococcus, the agents of typhoid, plague, dysentery, tetanus, diphtheria, yellow fever and rabies. A few were imported and conditioned in Léo, while very crude vaccines were produced locally from bacteriological cultures of the targeted pathogens, heat-killed before inoculation, and used as preventive measures among populations with a high incidence of the targeted diseases, or in an attempt to control outbreaks. Some vaccines had therapeutic rather than preventive goals; for example, patients with gonorrhoea were administered the antigonococcal vaccine in the hope that this mix of antigens inoculated in large quantities would result in the production of systemic antibodies that would in turn control the infection in their genital tract. An interesting concept was the auto-vaccin (self-vaccine): an isolate of a given pathogen obtained from a given patient

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