London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

No Time To Lose, the new book by Professor Peter Piot, Director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, was launched at a seminar on 5 July with The Lancet.

An audience of more than 200 joined Professor Piot and Richard Horton, Editor of The Lancet, to reflect on over four decades responding to Ebola, HIV/AIDS and other epidemics, and discuss how we can effectively meet urgent new and emerging global health challenges.

The memoirs, published by WW Norton & Company, begin in a laboratory in Belgium in 1976, where the newly qualified Dr Piot and his colleagues receive mysterious blood samples from victims of a lethal new disease in the equatorial forest of Zaire. Having co-identified the virus later named Ebola, Piot is dispatched to the quarantine zone to track the outbreak to its source and discover its transmission mechanisms.

Living and working among dying villagers and missionaries deep in the rainforest, Piot repeatedly risked his life to collect blood samples and understand the spread of the Ebola epidemic. Back in Europe, he set out to work with vulnerable communities from Antwerp to Nairobi. As one of the few researchers in sexually-transmitted diseases with knowledge of Africa, he was among the first to understand and respond to the burgeoning AIDS epidemic there.

Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, millions suffered and died. Piot and his co-workers struggled against official denial to prevent new infections, care for patients, set up clean blood banks and pull together the first international AIDS research initiatives. Piot offers a first-hand account of how the epidemic ravaged Africa, and how he undertook the difficult task as director of UNAIDS.

Piot worked tirelessly to engage with AIDS groups and activists, win over world leaders including Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro, Bill Clinton and Kofi Annan, and persuade the pharmaceutical industry to bring down the price of life-saving medicines. Over a few hectic years, he succeeded in mobilising billions of dollars in funding and co-ordinated political support for effective medical and social action to limit the pandemic and save lives. However, millions more died needlessly from AIDS, and it is still infecting hundreds of thousands today.

Kofi Annan, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former Secretary-General of the United Nations, said of the book:  “From the discovery of the Ebola virus to the struggle against HIV, Peter Piot has been at the forefront of the global fight against infectious diseases. In this insightful book, Dr Piot reminds us of the importance of our shared responsibility for overcoming global humanitarian challenges.”