Yellow fever was the first virus identified to be able to infect humans (human virus) in 1901 and so far about 219 human viruses have been identified.
Yellow fever disease is endemic in tropical areas of Africa and Central and South America and 27 countries are at the highest risk for yellow fever epidemics in Africa.
The burden of yellow fever in Africa is estimated at 84,000–170,000 severe cases and 29,000–60,000 deaths annually. However, more than 25 major yellow fever outbreaks have been recorded in the Americas during the 18th and 19th centuries, including severe ones in 1878 in the Memphis and Tennessee areas of the United States.
While Africa is the most affected continent by the disease, that is not the only link it has with Africa. The continent also played a remarkable role in the breakthrough that led to a better understanding of the human virus and the development of a yellow fever vaccine.
In 1927 scientists were researching to confirm the cause of yellow fever and develop a vaccine. Before there was already a good understanding of the causes of diseases and preventions such as vaccination as discovered by Louis Pasteur.
Compared to what was known about bacteria scientists knew very little about the virus in humans and the cultivation of viruses on tissue culture was not yet discovered.
The numerous attempts to isolate virus from a clinical material from a virus but had failed. This was because a virus greatly differs from bacteria in size, visibility, and cultivation.
In 1927 an Irish scientist Adrian Stokes was able to isolate the yellow fever virus and with two other scientists proved that yellow fever was caused by a virus and not bacteria. Yellow fever virus became the first human virus to be isolated.
This was a virological landmark that was not achieved in Europe or the United States but in makeshift laboratories in Lagos Nigeria and Accra Ghana.
The Rockefeller Foundation had established the West Africa Yellow Fever Commission in 1925 to research yellow fever and was headquartered in Lagos with a laboratory in Yaba in Lagos and Accra.
During the research, a yellow fever survivor named Asibi from the small town of Kpeve, Ghana provided his own blood for the research. From Asibi’s blood the yellow fever virus called the “Asibi strain” was isolated.
This marked a historic moment in the fight against yellow fever as Asibi’s blood was eventually used to develop the first successful vaccine, 17D. Asibi, a Ghanaian was given a pension in 1945.
While yellow fever research was going in Lagos and Accra, another was going on in Pasteur Institute in Dakar, Senegal. researchers there also successfully isolated the virus which they called the French strain and theirs was from the blood of a Senegalese man in Dakar named Francois Mayali, who had also survived the disease.
In 1932 the first yellow fever vaccine was developed in the Pasteur Institute of Tunis (founded 1983) and Pasteur Institute in Dakar (founded 1896) but it also had severe systemic and neurologic complications in a few cases.
Attempts to attenuate the virus used in the vaccine failed. Note that the Pasteur Institute in Dakar is the Senegalese research institute developing the popular 10-minute COVID-19 test kit.
The problem was later solved in 1937 by Max Theiler, a South African virologist and physician who developed a live-attenuated strain called 17D from the “Asibi” strain and successfully developed a 17D yellow fever vaccine.
Max Theiler’s 17D yellow fever vaccine is believed to be the safest and most effective vaccine ever made. Max Theiler was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1951 for this discovery in 1937, becoming the first African Nobel laureate.
Yellow fever so-called because infected persons usually have a fever and yellow skin coloration caused liver damage is an acute viral hemorrhagic disease transmitted by infected mosquitoes.
Adrian Stokes died of yellow fever infection in Lagos on September 19, 1927, and was buried in the European cemetery at Lagos in Nigeria.
There were several black Africans who contributed to the development of the yellow fever vaccine but were not mentioned or given credit to by the colonialists.
For instance, there were blacks who worked with the white scientists in the laboratories and on the field as shown in photographic records but they were not mentioned.
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