Chapter 9 - The Legacies of French Colonial Medicine

Summary

Chapter 9 looks at the history of colonial medicine in French Africa. Eugène Jamot, the most famous French military doctor, spearheaded efforts in the 1920s to control sleeping sickness. These interventions were later extended to other endemic diseases such as yaws, syphilis and leprosy. Case-finding activities in every village, with on-the-spot treatment of infected patients with injectable drugs administered using unsterilised syringes and needles, led to massive infection with the hepatitis C virus of as many as half of some birth cohorts. Obviously, this could have resulted in the concurrent iatrogenic transmission of HIV, in the very parts of central Africa inhabited by the chimpanzee source of the virus.