INTRODUCTION
Larry Krotz, through a career as a writer and documentary film maker, has explored the ways our actions affect our world. Widely traveled, he has become well acquainted with Canada’s north, including numerous First Nations communities, and the African countries of Kenya, Zimbabwe and Angola. Over the years his films, including Searching for Hawa’s Secret for the National Film Board of Canada, have won awards and been aired on Canadian and American television.
NEW BOOK
Piecing the Puzzle, the genesis of AIDS research in Africa.
Way back in the spring of 1980, Dr Allan Ronald, infectious diseases specialist at the University of Manitoba got a call from Herbert Nsanze, his counterpart at the University of Nairobi. Could Ronald come half way round the world to help the Kenyans deal with a stubborn strain of a nasty sexual infection called chancroid. Ronald, an expert on the disease, agreed to go making return trips over the next couple of years to help set u
p clinics and labs. Fascinated by Africa, he also brought along some of his brightest students who worked with the Kenyans to eventually bring the outbreak under control. Along the way, their efforts got the attention of other European and American scientists. One night when a group of them were having a restaurant dinner, American, James Curran, was called away to take a phone call. He needed to return home to lend his expertise to a puzzling new disease that was killing gay men in San Francisco. Nobody around the table knew that this new infection would come to be called HIV/AIDS. Nor did they fathom that within months their little clinics in Kenya would be on the front line of Africa’s epidemic of this same devastating disease.
Piecing the Puzzle is the fascinating story of the next thirty years and the role Canadians played with their Kenyan, European and American partners to figure out both the epidemiology of the fearsome AIDS virus as well as strategies to treat and try to contain one of the biggest infectious disease epidemics of all time, an epidemic that has defined the last decades for all of the world and especially the continent of Africa.
Our book will be out in the spring of 2012. Look for it in University of Manitoba Press catalogues.
