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Nelson Sewankambo
He helped give Uganda's epidemic its first description in print — and made sure Ugandans did the research.
The rise
A Makerere University physician working out of Mulago Hospital, Sewankambo joined the team that went into Rakai and Masaka in the mid-1980s to investigate a wasting illness the fishing and trading communities of Lake Victoria had already named 'slim'. They took histories and specimens in district wards and in the villages, and sent samples to Britain, where laboratories confirmed infection with HTLV-III.
What they did
In October 1985 he co-authored the Lancet paper 'Slim disease: a new disease in Uganda and its association with HTLV-III infection', the first published description of AIDS in Uganda. He then helped build the Rakai Community Cohort Study, one of the world's longest-running population HIV studies, and led Makerere's College of Health Sciences, training Africans to run African research.
The full picture
He worked closely with Museveni-era health institutions and with large US-funded trials in Rakai; the male-circumcision and treatment studies conducted there have drawn recurring criticism over informed consent and the power imbalance between wealthy foreign sponsors and poor rural cohorts.
Why it matters
Uganda's unusually frank early response to AIDS rested on evidence that Ugandan doctors gathered and published themselves, in a journal the whole world reads. It is a case of scientific honesty arriving before political courage rather than after it.
“We were asked — why go to Rakai, are you born there? But we came. We volunteered our time. We did the first research without a budget. We started small, but were determined.”