If Africa has a son to be proud of, Professor Souleymane Mboup is certainly one of them.
A renowned Senegalese scientist, he is best known in the world scientific community for being, with his team at Le Dantec Hospital in Dakar, the first to discover in 1985, HIV-2, a form of AIDS virus that mainly affects people in West Africa.
With his figure and sartorial elegance, the man is sparing of words and we had to resort to people close to him to obtain an interview. He welcomed us with a joke: “I had told myself that I would no longer give an interview, but it’s all because of El Hadj Ndiaye.” He said, giving his communication officer a pat on the back, to indicate that the latter is the one who made the decision.
Pr. Mboup’s large office is decorated roughly: a modest aquarium with fish of different colors swimming, and a few tables, one of which is littered with the distinctions received from various institutions in the world and which testify to the researcher’s decisive contribution to the progress in populations’ health.
On the walls of this room offering a breathtaking view of the new town of Diamniadio (27 km from Dakar), certificates of recognition and photos showing the doctor alongside senior officials, including President Macky Sall are suspend.
As I was looking at the picture of Macky Sall, he took this opportunity to hail the President’s efforts to promote research and innovation. He then told us this secret: “He (Macky Sall) will soon be chosen by American organizations as an example of a head of state that significantly supports scientific research.”
While Macky Sall and his peers support scientific research, Professor Mboup is already in, because research is his passion. He has devoted his life to it for more than 40 years and is thus referred to as one the best in the world in this area, hence the nickname of “Africa’s Mr. AIDS” that many have rightly given to him.
This nickname, he owes it to his participation in the discovery in 1985 of HIV-2, a virus with its own peculiarities and which is less virulent and less transmissible than HIV-1. “It is after ten years of follow-up of the people on whom this virus was found that we made these conclusions,” he says, adding that “for example, for the mother-to-child transmission of AIDS the risk is over 33 percent if the mother has HIV-1, against less than 5 percent when it comes to HIV-2.
The discovery of HIV-2, the result of multidisciplinary cooperation between the University of Dakar, the University of Tours (France) and the Harvard School of Public Health (USA), has shown above all, the importance of collaboration in the world of research, but also “that there are researchers in Africa capable of competing with any other researchers in the world,” he proudly said.
It is from this international collaboration that the Institute for Health Research, Epidemiological Surveillance and Training (Iressef) has emerged. Located in the heart of the city of Diamniadio, this center will support public health policies but also promote research to combat certain diseases that can turn into a pandemic, such as the Ebola virus, Zika, malaria, cancer, TB, HIV…
“We have here (at Iressef), state-of-the-art equipment and researchers able to work on several topics and in various fields of health. This is a very comparative advantage and few centers in the world have it,” Professor Mboup says, urging African states to work for the return of their sons who are studying abroad.
Born in 1951 in Dakar, Senegal, this scientist, who is also a colonel in the Senegalese army (now retired,) did his studies in the Senegalese capital before flying to France in 1976, where he earned a PhD from the Institut Pasteur in 1981 and a Doctorate in Bacteriology, Virology in 1983 at the University of Tours.
Pr. Mboup, a pharmacist who likes a bit of fun, with a permanent smile on his face, is the author of more than 300 articles and 18 books, namely on infectious diseases, meningitis and AIDS.
He is the one, the Senegalese government relied on to launch its AIDS prevention program in the 1980s. This has allowed the country to contain the spread of the disease and have one of the lowest prevalence rates in the world (about 0.7percent).
Today, more than ever, the one who worked on Hepatitis before becoming interested in AIDS, continues to devote his life to research and innovation in the field of health, to the delight of his African compatriots.
ARD/Dng/te/fss/abj/APA