Sir Peter Karel, Baron Piot (born 17 February 1949)[1] is a Belgian-British microbiologist known for his research into Ebola and AIDS.
After helping discover the Ebola virus in 1976 and leading efforts to contain the first-ever recorded Ebola epidemic that same year, Piot became a pioneering researcher into AIDS. He has held key positions in the United Nations and World Health Organization involving AIDS research and management. He has also served as a professor at several universities worldwide. He is the author of 16 books and over 600 scientific articles.
Early life and education
Piot was born in Keerbergen, Belgium.[2] His father was a civil servant who worked with agricultural exports, and his mother ran a construction company. Piot is the oldest of two brothers and a sister.[1]
In 1976, while working at the Institute of Tropical Medicine, Piot was part of a team that observed a Marburg-like virus in a sample of blood taken from a sick nun working in Zaire.[4][5] Piot and his colleagues subsequently traveled to Zaire as part of an International Commission set up by the Government of Zaire to help quell the outbreak.[1] The International Commission made key discoveries into how the virus spread, and traveled from village to village, spreading information and putting the ill and those who had come into contact with them into quarantine. The epidemic was already waning when the International Commission arrived, thanks to measures taken by local and national authorities, and it finally stopped in three months, after it had killed almost 300 people.[6] The events were dramatised by Mike Walker on BBC Radio 4 in December 2014 in a production by David Morley. Piot narrated the programme.[7]
Piot has received the majority of the credit for discovering Ebola, since in 1976, it was claimed he was the one to receive blood samples while working in a lab at the Institute for Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium.[3] The samples were once claimed to be originally sent by Dr. Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum, a Congolese doctor who obtained the blood samples from those sickened with a mysterious disease in then-Zaire, later discovered to be Ebola. In 2012, Piot published a memoir entitled No Time to Lose which chronicles his professional work, including the discovery of the Ebolavirus; he mentions Muyembe in passing rather than as a co-discoverer.[8] In a 2016 Journal of Infectious Disease article, co-signed by most of the actors from that first outbreak, including Peter Piot and Jean-Jacques Muyembe, the claims by both Piot and Muyembe to have played a significant role in the early discovery of Ebola have been refuted.[9] Piot stated in 2019 that "my book was not an attempt to write the history of Ebola, but more my personal experience".[10]
In 2014, in the face of an unprecedented Ebola epidemic in western Africa, Piot and other scientists called for the emergency release of the experimental ZMapp vaccine for use on humans before it had undergone clinical testing on humans.[13] That year, he was appointed by Director General Margaret Chan to the World Health Organization's Advisory Group on the Ebola Virus Disease Response, co-chaired by Sam Zaramba and David L. Heymann.[14] He also chaired an independent panel convened by Harvard Global Health Institute and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine into the national and international response to the epidemic, which sharply criticised the response of the WHO and put forward ten recommendations for the body's reorganisation.[15] In February 2020, he criticised the delay in declaring the 2019–20 novel coronavirus outbreak focused on Hubei, China, a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, and advocated a five-point scale for outbreaks, rather the current binary (emergency/no emergency) system.[16]
In 2020, Piot was appointed to the European Commission’s advisory panel on COVID-19, co-chaired by Ursula von der Leyen and Stella Kyriakides.[17] In the preparations for the Global Health Summit hosted by the European Commission and the G20 in May 2021, Piot co-chaired the event's High-Level Scientific Panel.[18]
Personal life
In May 2020, Piot disclosed that he had had COVID-19.[19]
Piot is fluent in English, French, and Dutch.[3] He is married to the American anthropologist Heidi Larson.[20]
Other activities
Africa Europe Foundation (AEF), Member of the Strategy Group on Health (since 2020)[21]
Centre for International Health Protection (ZIG), Robert Koch Institute (RKI), member of the scientific advisory board (since 2020)[22]
Exemplars in Global Health, member of the senior advisory board (since 2020)[23]
^Moon S; et al. (2015), "Will Ebola change the game? Ten essential reforms before the next pandemic. The report of the Harvard-LSHTM Independent Panel on the Global Response to Ebola", Lancet, 386 (10009): 2204–2221, doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(15)00946-0, PMC7137174, PMID26615326
^"Previous medal winners". Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. 6 August 2014. Archived from the original on 23 January 2017. Retrieved 17 October 2018.
^"Peter Piot". German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Retrieved 26 May 2021.
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