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The Lomidine Files - The Untold Story of a Medical Disaster in Colonial Africa (Hardcover)
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The Lomidine Files - The Untold Story of a Medical Disaster in Colonial Africa (Hardcover)
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After the Second World War, French colonial health services, armed
with a newly discovered drug, made the eradication of sleeping
sickness their top priority. A single injection of Lomidine (known
as Pentamidine in the United States) promised to protect against
infection for six months or longer. Mass campaigns of "preventive
lomidinization" were launched with immense enthusiasm across
Africa. But the drug proved to be both inefficient and dangerous.
Contaminated injections caused bacterial infections that progressed
to gangrene, killing dozens of people. Shockingly, the French
physicians who administered the shots seemed to know the drug's
risk: while they obtained signed consent before giving Lomidine to
French citizens, they administered it to Africans without their
consent-sometimes by force. In The Lomidine Files, Guillaume
Lachenal traces the medicine's trajectory from experimental trials
during the Second World War, when it was introduced as a miracle
cure for sleeping sickness, to its abandonment in the late 1950s,
when a series of deadly incidents brought lomidinization campaigns
to a grinding halt. He explores colonial doctors' dangerously
hubristic obsession with an Africa freed from disease and describes
the terrible reactions caused by the drug, the resulting panic of
colonial authorities, and the decades-long cover-up that followed.
A fascinating material history that touches on the drug's
manufacture and distribution, as well as the tragedies that
followed in its path, The Lomidine Files resurrects a nearly
forgotten scandal. Ultimately, it illuminates public health not
only as a showcase of colonial humanism and a tool of control, but
also as an arena of mediocrity, powerlessness, and stupidity.
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