The woman who smuggled HIV into Bulgaria in her handbag

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)

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Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there. For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more. Recent episodes explore everything from the death of Adolf Hitler, the first spacewalk and the making of the movie Jaws, to celebrity tortoise Lonesome George, the Kobe earthquake and the invention of superglue. We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: Eva Peron – Argentina’s Evita; President Ronald Reagan and his famous ‘tear down this wall’ speech; Thomas Keneally on why he wrote Schindler’s List; and Jacques Derrida, France’s ‘rock star’ philosopher. You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, such as the civil rights swimming protest, the disastrous D-Day rehearsal, and the death of one of the world’s oldest languages.