The History of Blood Transfusion in Sub-Saharan Africa, by William H. Schneider

Abstract

The History of Blood Transfusion in Sub-Saharan Africa, by William H. Schneider. Athens, Ohio University Press, 2013. ix, 239 pp. $32.95 US (paper). William Schneider's new book is first extensive historical study of blood transfusion in Africa. It breaks ground in history of medicine and public health by detailing how health professionals introduced and practiced blood transfusion in Sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa). Schneider explored archives of colonial-era governments, European Red Cross societies, independent African governments, and various physicians and health officers for evidence of blood transfusion practices in last hundred years. The lasting value of Schneider's research may very well lie in its meticulous efforts to illustrate how blood transfusion rose to level of effective medicine in SubSaharan Africa, but text itself begins with a different emphasis. This book is cast, first and foremost, as a veteran historian's attempt to help scientists and public health experts determine role of blood transfusion in origins of AIDS epidemic (p. 4). The principle question facing scholars interested in origin of AIDS has been, how did a simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) that existed among primates of Central and West Africa for thousands of years suddenly jump species and become a viral epidemic in humans only within last thirty-five years? There is widespread agreement that constitutive conditions for AIDS epidemic were both complex and recent. Intravenous injections and blood transfusion practices have therefore always been at top of epidemiologist's list of likely co-factors in early spread of HIV among humans. Colleagues of Schneider at Indiana University approached him to address their own theories about origins of HIV-AIDS epidemic. They wanted to know from a historian (previously versed in history of blood transfusions) what role, if any, did practice play in origins of HIVAIDS epidemic. No history of blood transfusion in Africa existed. Schneider's response was therefore to produce a rigorous account of the major changes in introduction and expansion of blood transfusion [in Sub-Saharan Africa] from first reports of practice, during colonial rule in 1920s, to independence of AIDS, at end of twentieth century (p. 4). Schneider's history does deliver some novel findings on introduction and practice of blood transfusion in Sub-Saharan Africa, but it is far from clear that this book gives scientists and public health experts what they want or need. The book provides a detailed but still circumstantial case for saying that blood transfusion was practiced widely-enough in twentieth-century Africa for it to have been a highly likely vector of HIV transmission in decades preceding 1982, year when AIDS was first linked to blood transfusion. …