August 28, 2006
United Nations HIV/AIDS Program Executive Director to speak at Clark
Worcester, Mass. - Peter Piot, UNAIDS Executive Director and Under Secretary-General of the United Nations, will deliver "AIDS: from exposing to overcoming injustices" at Clark University at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, September 18, in Razzo Hall at the Traina Center for the Arts, 92 Downing St., Worcester.
Dr. Peter Piot, Under Secretary-General of the United Nations, has been the executive director of UNAIDS since its creation in 1995, after serving three years as associate director of the Global Programme on AIDS of the World Health Organization.
A renowned scientist, manager and activist, Piot has become the chief advocate for worldwide action against AIDS. The focus of his work at UNAIDS has been to challenge world leaders to consider AIDS in light of social and economic development as well as security. As a result, he has brought together 10 organizations of the United Nations system around a common agenda on AIDS, spearheading UN reform.
Piot was major contributor at the XVI International AIDS Conference in Toronto in earlier this month.
"It's fair to say that in a quarter of a century, AIDS has made it to one of the make-or-break issues of our time. It is now in an altogether different league; the league of global change, of climate change, of massive poverty, of chronic armed conflicts," said Piot. "And a disease that we had not even heard of 25 years ago has made it as the first cause of death for men and women under 60 in the world. There is no precedent for that in our recent history."
Piot said that the history of AIDS is also a history of globalization, but not globalization of markets and profits.
"It's a globalization of an epidemic, and it tells a story of globalization of human behavior and networks because every single person living with HIV is connected to all other persons living with HIV," he said.
Piot, who has an M.D. from the University of Ghent, and a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Antwerp, Belgium, has done extensive field work in Africa. In 1976 he co-discovered the Ebola virus in Zaire. In the decade that followed, Piot initiated a series of collaborative projects in Burundi, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Tanzania and Zaire. Projet SIDA in Kinshasa, Zaire, was the first international project on AIDS in Africa. It is recognized as having provided the basis of understanding of HIV infection in Africa.
Piot also served as a professor of microbiology, and of public health at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, and the Universities of Nairobi, Brussels and Lausanne. He has written 16 books and more than 500 scientific articles. His many awards for scientific and societal achievement include being knighted as a Baron by King Albert II of Belgium in 1995. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States and the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium, and is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London, UK.
This event, part of the 2006-07 Clark Talks on Global Health and Social Justice, is co-sponsored by the President's Office and Department of International Development, Community, and Environment (IDCE). The series is aimed at raising awareness about major international health issues and their effect on world population, particularly in developing countries.
IDCE faculty have worked worldwide on issues of HIV/AIDS, reproductive health and environmental health with United Nations and other international agencies, particularly in West Africa and South East Asia. For more information about this lecture, call 508-793-7201.