Dr. Peter Piot has served as an advisor to
our foundation.
He was the first leader of the United Nations
program to fight AIDS,
and today he’s director of the London School
of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
He began his career in the 1970’s
when he and his colleagues discovered the
Ebola virus.
In epidemics, what matters is time.
If you act early, you prevent so many more
cases.
But in order to stop an epidemic,
you need to know how the virus is transmitted,
how it’s spread.
With Ebola we had no clue.
That was frightening.
When we arrived, this epidemic had killed
300 people.
The pilots were so concerned they never stopped
the engines.
They said get out of the plane and off they
went.
You need to establish a relationship with
people.
We’ve got molecular epidemiology,
genomics sequencing and artificial intelligence,
but nothing can replace talking to people
and listening to people.
Because they went through it.
In theory, Ebola should not give rise to huge
epidemics.
Because only people who have very close contact
can become infected.
But in West Africa in 2014, 11,000 people
were killed.
Hospitals were closed, schools were closed.
Airlines stopped flying there,
the farmers couldn’t sell their produce.
Epidemics and crisis in general,
they bring out the best and the worst in people.
One of the proudest moments
as the Director of the London School of Hygiene
and Tropical Medicine
was when in 2014,
I encouraged people to volunteer to work in
West Africa
and take care of patients and help with epidemic
control.
We had hundreds of people who volunteered
within 48 hours.
People who at the risk of their own life will
take care of patients.
There are constantly epidemics that don’t
make it to the headlines,
but it’s part of our human condition now.
We cannot just wait until the next epidemic.
