Professor Luis Cuevas (1956-2023)

Posted on: January 13, 2023

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Professor Luis Cuevas, who passed away on Monday 2nd January 2023.

Known for his work in epidemiology and the diagnosis of infectious diseases in the tropics, particularly tuberculosis, Luis was a key member of the IMPACT TB team since the start of the project in 2016.

Conducting his work mainly in low- and middle-income settings he focussed on health problems that caused the highest burden of disease, he enjoyed identifying common barriers for the diagnosis and management of diseases of poverty and worked to improve access to diagnosis and treatment within those populations. He was involved in the development of diagnostics approaches to reach a same-day diagnosis of TB, which were adopted by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2011.

Understanding that poor populations have limited access to be diagnosed and treated at a local level, with colleagues, he developed community-based approaches to identify people with TB at a village level, doubling the number of cases detected and improving treatment completion in Ethiopia and Nigeria, saving countless lives.

His work in paediatrics was instrumental in the promotion of research on child TB and contributed to the WHO/TDR and NIH (USA) consensus research definitions for child TB. While he was also involved in conducting long term post-licensure evaluations of rotavirus vaccines and, with colleagues, monitoring the impact of vaccines on medical consultations, hospitalisations and mortality in Brazil.

His interest in emerging infections meant that Luis was at the forefront of much of LSTM’s research during the COVID-19 pandemic as well as being at heart of developing new point of care diagnostics for infections such as Chikungunya.