South Africa and Aids drugs
At the end of the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of people in South Africa were still dying from HIV/Aids because effective drug treatments were prohibitively expensive for a developing country. Under p...
2 Dec 202110min
AZT: The breakthrough treatment for Aids
In 1987 the first successful drug treatment was developed for Aids. AZT went from initial test to approval in just over two years - at the time it was the fastest approval in US history. Claire Bowes ...
1 Dec 202110min
The early days of HIV/Aids
The HIV virus was first identified by medical experts in a journal article in 1981. In the early days of the epidemic, carriers of the virus were stigmatised and treatment was in its infancy. Alan Joh...
30 Nov 202110min
The Aids 'patient zero' myth
In the early days of Aids, a misunderstanding made one man the face of the epidemic. Canadian air steward Gaetan Dugas developed the symptoms of HIV/Aids in the early 1980s, but a misreading of scient...
29 Nov 202110min
The assassination of the Mirabal sisters
The three Mirabal sisters were leading figures in the Dominican Republic's opposition movement against the dictator, General Rafael Trujillo. Patria, Maria Teresa and the most prominent of the three,...
26 Nov 20218min
Estonia’s internet ‘Tiger Leap’
Estonia started connecting all its schools to the internet very early. In 1996 less than two percent of the world’s population had access to the web but Estonia’s initiative, known as ‘Tiger Leap’ cap...
25 Nov 20218min
The doctor who helped her mother to die
In 2001, the Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalise voluntary euthanasia: although the new law was ground-breaking, it was based in part on the result of a dramatic criminal tri...
24 Nov 20219min
Europe's last smallpox epidemic
Eighteen million people were vaccinated against smallpox in the former communist Yugoslavia in only a month and a half in 1972. The mass vaccination campaign succeeded in containing the last smallpox ...
23 Nov 20219min
