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Prof. Fernando Aiuti Obituary

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Dear Colleagues and Friends,
We  announce with sadness that Prof. Fernando Aiuti passed away last Wednesday.

Fernando Aiuti was born in Urbino, Italy in1935. His medical and scientific career took place in Rome, his beloved city. Fernando has been a pioneer in the recognition of PID. 

He was instrumental in developing awareness of these conditions, and he participated in the early steps of their description, understanding and therapy.
Together with Claude Griscelli in France, Jaak Vossen in the Netherlands and the late Roland Levinsky in UK, he raised interest to PID of both the scientific and medical community in a rather original and fecund interplay. Fernando has been extensively involved in the organization of the first EGID meetings. He organized himself in 1988 the third EGID meeting in Viterbo, a superb place north of Rome, where the best science at that time met the medical study of PID in a friendly atmosphere. As such Prof. Aiuti was co-founder of ESID.

Fernando Aiuti, beyond his work on PID, played a major role in Italy in making AIDS a treatable disease, to foster research on AIDS and to prevent spread of fake news about its transmission. His contribution to public health matched his medical and research work on PID, quite a significant and rare achievement! Prof. Aiuti has succeeded in the difficult task of maintaining a high scientific profile over the years, combining it with a political and communicative commitment, such that clinical immunology has become a science known to non-experts. He organized the first registry for PID, in the knowledge that only a network of experts could help to define the natural history of these serious and misunderstood diseases. Fernando Aiuti, an early figure of the burgeoning field of PID science and medicine will be greatly missed. We wish to send our sincere condolences to Prof. Aiuti and his family.

Isabelle Meyts,
on behalf of the ESID Board.