The woman who smuggled HIV into Bulgaria in her handbag

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 1 December 2022

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

In 1985, at the height of the Cold War, Bulgaria was a strictly controlled communist dictatorship. It was also facing a wave of infection and death caused by a mysterious new virus. The authorities refused to recognise the threat of HIV and AIDS, so one of Bulgaria’s virologists took the initiative. In this programme for World Aids Day, Professor Radka Argirova tells Janet Barrie how she smuggled the live HIV virus back from Germany to start testing in Bulgaria for the first time. (Photo: Professor Radka Argirova in her laboratory. Credit: BBC)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for downloading the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service with me, Janet
0:10.6	Barry.
0:11.6	I'm taking you back to Bulgaria in the 1980s, a country and southeast Europe that had been
0:17.1	under communist dictatorship since 1944.
0:21.0	A mysterious new virus has been detected in many parts of the world.
0:27.9	It's been causing disease and death amongst mostly homosexual men and intravenous drug
0:33.0	users.
0:34.0	Some had also contracted it through blood transfusions.
0:37.9	The disease is called a quiet immune deficiency syndrome.
0:41.6	AIDS had been recognised as a new disease in 1981 when growing numbers of young gay men
0:47.9	died of unusual infections and rare cancers.
0:51.6	It was reported around the world, including here on the BBC.
0:58.7	A condition which opens the software from it to a wide range of infections and illnesses.
1:04.7	AIDS seems to remove the patient's resistance to these and as a result is usually fatal.
1:09.7	Two years later the virus which came to be known as HIV was identified as its cause.
1:15.2	People are scared.
1:16.4	Some countries are launching information campaigns to warn of AIDS, but in Bulgaria it's dismissed
1:22.1	and minimised.
1:23.4	Even as foreign students and sailors die in Bulgarian hospitals, it's shrugged off as a
1:28.6	gay disease, a problem solely for the decadent West.
1:41.4	It's 1985 and Dr Ratka Argyrava is working as a virologist at a high profile research institute
1:48.6	in the Bulgarian capital, Sophia.
	...

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