Peter Piot on tackling ebola and HIV
The Life Scientific
BBC
4.6 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 9 February 2016
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With the Zika epidemic in Brazil being declared an international health emergency just months after the recent Ebola epidemic in West Africa, Jim Al-Khalili talks to Professor Peter Piot about a lifetime spent trying to stop the spread of deadly viruses.
Peter came across a strange new virus in 1976 when he was working in a small lab in his home town, Antwerp. Weeks later he was in Zaire meeting patients and trying to understand the transmission routes of this terrifying new virus which, together with colleagues, he named Ebola. Thousands of miles from home and surrounded by people dying, he says he felt very much alive. His career path was set.
He was heavily involved in the recent Ebola epidemic but most of Peter's career has been devoted to stopping the transmission of another deadly virus, HIV. He spent most of the eighties trying to convince the world that HIV/AIDS was a heterosexual disease and much of the nineties trying to mobilise the World Health Organisation and other UN agencies to take the threat posed to the world by HIV more seriously. It wasn't easy.
Today he is Director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in London.
Producer: Anna Buckley.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Life Scientific. |
| 0:03.6 | First broadcast on BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:06.3 | I'm Jim Alleili and my mission is to interview |
| 0:09.2 | the most fascinating and important scientists alive today and to find out what makes them tick. |
| 0:15.0 | In 1976 in a remote village of what was then Zaire |
| 0:20.0 | samples were sent back to Belgium from a Flemish nun who died a horrible death, |
| 0:25.1 | hemorrhaging in a way that had never been seen before. She had Ebola, |
| 0:29.4 | although no one knew it at the time. My guest today Peter Piot first identified the |
| 0:34.8 | strange and scary new virus down the microscope that same year in 1976 and |
| 0:39.6 | later together with a colleague named named it after Central African River. |
| 0:44.8 | He's known to many as Mr. Ebola, but has spent most of his career trying to stop the |
| 0:49.2 | spread of another deadly virus, HIV. For much of the 80s, he argued often in vain that the |
| 0:55.7 | terrifying new syndrome he was witnessing in men and women in Africa was the |
| 1:00.3 | same disease as the then so-called gay syndrome that was being reported in the West. |
| 1:06.0 | In 1995 he became executive director of the joint United Nations programme on HIV and AIDS, |
| 1:11.4 | UN AIDS, a post he held for 13 years. He was very involved in tackling |
| 1:16.1 | the recent Ebola epidemic in West Africa, arguing early on that a vaccine that hadn't been |
| 1:21.1 | fully tested in human clinical trials should nonetheless be used to treat people. |
| 1:26.0 | And now of course there's the new Zeka virus to deal with. |
| 1:30.0 | Professor Peter Piot, welcome to the life scientific. |
| 1:32.0 | So let me just jump straight in. Professor Peter Piot, welcome to the Life Scientific. |
| 1:32.8 | So let me just jump straight in. |
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