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Malik Peiris is the Chair Professor of Microbiology at The University of Hong Kong, a Virologist at the Queen Mary Hospital and the Scientific Director of the HKU-Pasteur Research Centre at Hong Kong.
And if that weren’t enough, he was also one of the genuine heroes of the SARS outbreak in 2003. Peiris and his team were the first to identify the causative agent (coronavirus) behind that epidemic.
You can read a brief profile of Peiris, and Guan Yi -another famed researcher and hero of that crisis - HERE written by Karl Taro Greenfeld.
And since I mentioned him, there is probably no better narrative of the SARS outbreak than Karl Taro Greenfeld’s The China Syndrome: The True Story of the 21st Century's First Great Epidemic.
Today we’ve a long, and informative interview with Professor Peiris appearing in The Hindu newspaper. It is well worth reading in its entirety.
Among the subjects discussed, Peiris argues that trying to make severity a criteria for declaring a pandemic is ill advised. That it is virtually impossible to gauge the virulence of an influenza virus during the opening months of an outbreak.
He also warns that we need to do a better job of surveillance in animals for reassortant viruses, and explains that H5N1 probably has some ways to go before it could ever become adapted to humans.
A hat tip to @CP_Branswell on Twitter for sending this link out.
Severity should not be part of pandemic criterion
July 29, 2010
At a time when the World Health Organisation (WHO) is being criticised for over-reacting and declaring a pandemic of the basis of only geographical spread of a novel flu virus, a leading virologist has argued that severity should not be included as a criterion.
Long before WHO's declaration, there was no doubt that this was a pandemic, observed J.S. Malik Peiris. He leads a multi-disciplinary research programme at the University of Hong Kong, studying emerging viral diseases, including influenza, which spread from animals to humans.
“It was a new virus, which we didn't know about, and [it] swept across the world,” he pointed out at a recent conference on the current pandemic organised by the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre.
“If it had been just marginally more severe, we would have been shouting a different tune right now,” he remarked when this correspondent met him after the conference.
