Grethe Rask

Margrethe P. Rask (1930 to 1977), better known as Grethe Rask, was a Danish physician and surgeon who worked in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and is remembered as one of the earliest known people to die of AIDS. Born in Thisted, Denmark, she briefly practised in Zaire in 1964, when she was recalled to Europe for training in stomach surgery and tropical illnesses. From 1972 she worked at a small hospital she set up in the village of Abumombazi, and from 1975 she was chief surgeon at the Danish Red Cross Hospital in Kinshasa. She developed symptoms in late 1974 and returned to Denmark in 1977, where tests at Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen found opportunistic infections and a nearly non-existent T-cell count that her doctors could not then explain. She died of Pneumocystis pneumonia on 12 December 1977. Her blood was negative for HIV when tested in Denmark in 1984, but a sample sent to the United States in 1987 tested positive on two systems. She was one of the first non-Africans, and one of the first women, known to have died of AIDS-related causes.