Sellappan Nirmala: The Woman Who Discovered India's First HIV Cases

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Thirty years ago, India discovered the dreaded HIV virus had reached its shores when blood samples from six sex workers tested positive.

At a time where the Indian press wrote “that HIV was a disease of the ‘debauched West'” and presumed it would never come to their country, only one woman, Sellappan Nirmala, pushed forward on testing for HIV and AIDS – and in doing, uncovered an epidemic. But 30 years later, almost nobody knows her name.