Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. From about to , a culture of medical experimentation promoted blood transfusion as a therapy for severe anemia in Europe, which was applied in German East Africa in for a case of blackwater fever, a complication of malaria afflicting mainly Europeans.
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.
While research in German colonies is highlighted here, this was a transnational medical culture that crossed borders and oceans. 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.
Keywords: blood transfusion, blood serum, Africa, HIV, blackwater fever, malaria, sleeping sickness, German colonialism, animal research. 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. 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.
A related line of research has focused on the early history of blood transfusions in Africa, which may have allowed SIVs to adapt to humans by providing a highly efficient means of transmitting the virus from one person to another compared with sexual contact or unsterile needles. The major historians of blood transfusion in Africa argue that the heyday of this procedure in sub-Saharan Africa followed World War I, which appears to be the period when some strains of HIV became epidemic.
