No Time to Lose: A Life In Pursuit Of Deadly Viruses

"Yes, Peter Piot founded UNAIDS and later became the director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where I have worked in the past. He’s a very well-known and respected virologist. This book helped me with my own book Ebola: Profile of a Killer Virus , which I wrote during the 2014-16 epidemic. It is a marvellous, scientific autobiography. Basically, Piot trained in virology at the Prince Leopold Institute of Tropical Medicine in Belgium in the 1970s. While he was training, some samples came in for analysis from Zaire, as it was then – now the Democratic Republic of Congo. It turned out that in a remote village people had come down with a ghastly disease which was deadly. In the book, Piot tells of the urgency of the situation, and the challenges of the work. He describes the everyday life of this lab, receiving samples and isolating virus from them – no protective clothing whatsoever, just handling the samples on the bench. It’s unbelievable. I’m amazed none of them caught Ebola. Anyway, after that a United Nations commission went out to this village in DRC, called Yambuku, to work out where the virus had come from and how to prevent another outbreak. Piot was part of that commission. The village is near the Ebola River – so they called the virus Ebola as they thought calling it after the village would stigmatize it (rather like Trump’s attempt to call the new coronavirus the Wuhan or Chinese virus). Piot describes his arduous trip through the bush to get to Yambuku and the devastating scene that met him. Then they airlifted in Land Rovers and equipment and did a full epidemiological study, visiting every family that had experienced the disease and talking to sufferers and their relatives. It was a wonderful study under really difficult circumstances. They worked out the epidemiology of the virus and also managed to trace case zero – the village school teacher. He had gone on a hunting trip into the forest just before the outbreak started. Ebola is transmitted by bats, so he must have handled and perhaps eaten one and got infected that way. Then he returned, infected his family and on it went. Once it gets into humans, it transmits from person to person via body secretions. This was one of the classic epidemiological studies, and it’s absolutely fascinating to read about it. While I was writing my own book on Ebola I went to Freetown in Sierra Leone while the 2014-16 Ebola epidemic was going on, visiting treatment centres and virus testing labs. Obviously this is in no way similar, because I knew perfectly well what protective kit I should be wearing and how to protect myself. But this book certainly struck a chord with me. Yes, but Piot is very down to earth about it. He tells how he’s going out day-to-day in a Land Rover, visiting people in the community. He gives really heartrending descriptions of the villagers who were left mystified. They have all sorts of theories about what happened – but a virus doesn’t enter into it, because they didn’t know about viruses. He is a marvellous storyteller, there’s no doubt about that."