Book info

• Title No Time to Lose
• Author Peter Piot
• Year 2012
• Genre Memoir

When Peter Piot was in medical school, a professor warned, 'There’s no future in infectious diseases. They’ve all been solved.' Fortunately, Piot ignored him, and the result has been an exceptional, adventure-filled career. In the 1970s, as a young man, Piot was sent to Central Africa as part of a team tasked with identifying a grisly new virus. Crossing into the quarantine zone on the most dangerous missions, he studied local customs to determine how this disease—the Ebola virus—was spreading. Later, Piot found himself in the field again when another mysterious epidemic broke out: AIDS. He traveled throughout Africa, leading the first international AIDS initiatives there. Then, as founder and director of UNAIDS, he negotiated policies with leaders from Fidel Castro to Thabo Mbeki and helped turn the tide of the epidemic. Candid and engrossing, No Time to Lose captures the urgency and excitement of being on the front lines in the fight against today’s deadliest diseases.

Thoughts

This book chronicles a scientist, researcher and UN chiefs journey through two outbreaks - Ebola and Aids. I picked this book up long before the Ebola recurrence, but it seemed like an ideal time to read it.

The book is in two distinct halves - one of which I thought was brilliant, the other left me cold. The first half sees Piot start out as a young academic, researching diseases and epidemics. Reading how he travelled to Africa, saw first-hand the issues and dealt with working out where Ebola came from and how it spread was endlessly fascinating. How he combined the horrors of witnessing first hand devastation with trying to raise a young family is beyond me.

The second half starts with a similar story regarding Aids, but Piot quickly rises through the ranks of the UN and WHO, and from there the story becomes a political nightmare. Numerous global government agencies working together and against each other in this huge fight against Aids - noble and vital work, but not really interesting reading for me.

The book is definitely worth a look though, if only to get a glimpse of the tireless efforts behind the scenes of these awful viruses.

Rating: 3 / 5