Two doctors from Belgium and Uganda were awarded the Hideyo Noguchi Africa Prize on Saturday at the Tokyo International Conference on African Development for their great strides in helping the world combat deadly infectious diseases.
Peter Piot, 64, the Belgian director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, codiscovered the Ebola virus in Zaire in 1976. His subsequent leadership in examining the lethal disease greatly helped improve the global community's ability to deal with outbreaks of hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola.
In a historic discovery in 1983, Piot, while leading a research team in Africa, detected the presence of HIV transmission among heterosexuals, giving the lie to the traditional assumption that AIDS only affected gay and lesbian people. He is also known for his pioneering research on mother-to-child transmission of HIV.