Zoom Meeting - Dr Keith Paver.

Dr Keith Paver is the RI polio eradication coordinator for Region 20, and he will be talking about the relationship between the eradication of polio and the fight against Covid-19.  We are very lucky to have a speaker of this quality speaking to our club.

A brief biography of Keith Paver follows:

Dr Keith Paver has worked in the field of public health for 40 years. Originally recruited straight from Bristol University with a BSc in Microbiology, he originally joined the Public Health Laboratory Service as a research clinical scientist in 1969, where he remained for the next 40 years until his retirement in 2008 at the age of 60, initially in Bristol and then in Manchester. 

The PHLS underwent a major reorganisation in 2003 when it became a special health authority directly accountable to the Secretary of State for Health with the addition of the Centre for Applied Microbiology and Research at Porton Down and the National Focus for Chemical Incidents, and then again in 2013 when it was absorbed into Public Health England as a result of the Health and Social Care Act of 2012, losing many of its local public functions to local authorities. 

Although he started his career working in a research capacity, after gaining his PhD for work on non-bacterial gastroenteritis Keith morphed into a diagnostic virologist ending up with consultant status with the Central Manchester NHS Foundation Trust. A major area of his work was in the diagnosis and epidemiology of hepatitis B and C and other blood borne infections, and he played a significant public health role in the early years of the HIV pandemic in Manchester. Over time, Keith’s brief expanded and for the last 10 years he was as much as an epidemiologist as a diagnostician, as well as introducing proper quality control measures into the diagnostic laboratories in Manchester. 

Alongside his busy day job, he has taught part time at post graduate level, lecturing on clinical and theoretical virology, epidemiology and public health at both Manchester universities and was a member of the Health Protection Agency, Northwest Regional Surveillance and training committees. 

Keith joined Rotary in 1987, serving as club president for the first time in 1993 and after various district roles as the Centennial District Governor in 2004-05. He was appointed as one of the 41 End Polio Now Coordinators in 2020.

Keith’s talk will likely cover the history of virus-borne diseases, the discovery of viruses, the ways in which viruses spread, the details of the current pandemic, its possible source, how it compares to other pandemics over the past 200 years, and the prognosis for the future based on the experiences of different countries across Europe.

Lastly, he could finish with an explanation of what viruses have done for us, including the role that viruses play in the human placenta, without which there will be no audience present to hear the talk!