My longtime colleague Luis Cuevas, who has died aged 66 of pancreatic cancer, was an academic who specialised in paediatrics, epidemiology and tropical medicine. For most of his career he did his research and teaching at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM), which he joined in 1985 after fleeing to the UK from political violence in his native Guatemala. He was still working at the LSTM at his death.
Luis’s work focused mainly on the diagnosis and management of diseases of poverty, and one of his most notable achievements was the development of a same-day diagnosis approach for tuberculosis, which was adopted by the World Health Organization in 2011. He was also involved in working out ways to diagnose people with the tropical disease Chikungunya and was at the forefront of LSTM’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
