Seema Yasmin Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018, PB, 208pp, £12.96, 978-1421426624
This book is a biography of Dr Joep Lange. He qualified in Amsterdam in 1982, just as the AIDS epidemic started. According to his obituary ‘he was one of the world’s top HIV/Aids researchers and a prominent pioneer of antiretroviral therapy’.1 He was killed by Ukrainian separatists when they shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, in 2014.
The book is written for a lay audience in a vivid, journalistic style. The writer, Dr Seema Yasmin, is a British medical doctor and AIDS activist who has taken to writing as a third career. Dr Yasmin does not hide her admiration for Dr Lange: she describes him as a role model and believes he achieved a great deal in his life.
He was one of the doctors responsible for the now historic Amsterdam AIDS studies. He spent decades railing at the slowness of the international response. Nor did he just rail: for 3 years he worked as a senior bureaucrat in the WHO global programme on AIDS (1992–1995). In 1995, he predicted that, because of the enormously high mutation rate of the HIV virus, single drug use would simply lead to resistance and that, as for TB, multi-drug regimens would be required. In this he proved correct. He worked on trials of interrupting mother–child transmission and later on trials of pre-exposure prophylaxis.
He became involved in AIDS in developing countries from an early stage of the epidemic. He was one of the first, in a trial in Mulago Hospital, Kampala, to show, in the face of great scepticism, that rural Africans could adhere to highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) and achieve results comparable with those in the West. Eventually, of course, such free treatment was provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), among others. The HIV epidemic is still massive, with 37 million affected in 2017, and, while AIDS deaths are falling, the prevalence of HIV infection is still increasing at a steady rate of about 1.7 million people per year.2 We desperately need other young doctors, inspired perhaps by Dr Lange’s life, to devote their lives to fighting it.
- © British Journal of General Practice 2020
