Joel Breman, who helped stop an Ebola outbreak in Africa, dies at 87
Part of a team flown to combat the deadly virus in 1976, Dr. Breman also worked to eradicate tropical diseases like smallpox, malaria and Guinea worm.
Dr. Joel Breman, an infectious disease specialist and member of the original team that helped fight Ebola in 1976, died April 6 at his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He was 87 years old.
His death was confirmed by his son, Matthew, who said his father died of kidney cancer. p>
“We were scared out of our minds,” Dr. Breman said, remembering his pioneering mission, in a National Institutes of Health newsletter in 2014, as a new, even more deadly Ebola epidemic raged that year.
Almost 40 years earlier, his team of five people came to land inside what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in a remote Roman Catholic mission hospital. They were faced with an unnamed viral infection, of unknown origin, and accompanying. of high fever and bleeding that led to a painful and rapid death.
Dr. Breman, sent by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had only this that he had described to the N.I.H. as the “most basic protective gear” against disease, in contrast to the full spacesuit-like gear that was standard during the later outbreak. He and other team members, working in intense heat and bitten by sandflies, "developed rashes and didn't know if we were going to get the virus as well," he said.
But he calmly began to deploy the techniques he had perfected on previous missions in Africa, as part of smallpox initiatives in Guinea and Burkina Faso. He interviewed patients and witnesses, traveling from village to village and going from house to house. He and his colleagues, he recalls, quickly determined that the infection had "spread through close contact with infected bodily fluids" and that it had spread in a rural hospital that used unsterilized needles.
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Part of a team flown to combat the deadly virus in 1976, Dr. Breman also worked to eradicate tropical diseases like smallpox, malaria and Guinea worm.
Dr. Joel Breman, an infectious disease specialist and member of the original team that helped fight Ebola in 1976, died April 6 at his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He was 87 years old.
His death was confirmed by his son, Matthew, who said his father died of kidney cancer. p>
“We were scared out of our minds,” Dr. Breman said, remembering his pioneering mission, in a National Institutes of Health newsletter in 2014, as a new, even more deadly Ebola epidemic raged that year.
Almost 40 years earlier, his team of five people came to land inside what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in a remote Roman Catholic mission hospital. They were faced with an unnamed viral infection, of unknown origin, and accompanying. of high fever and bleeding that led to a painful and rapid death.
Dr. Breman, sent by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had only this that he had described to the N.I.H. as the “most basic protective gear” against disease, in contrast to the full spacesuit-like gear that was standard during the later outbreak. He and other team members, working in intense heat and bitten by sandflies, "developed rashes and didn't know if we were going to get the virus as well," he said.
But he calmly began to deploy the techniques he had perfected on previous missions in Africa, as part of smallpox initiatives in Guinea and Burkina Faso. He interviewed patients and witnesses, traveling from village to village and going from house to house. He and his colleagues, he recalls, quickly determined that the infection had "spread through close contact with infected bodily fluids" and that it had spread in a rural hospital that used unsterilized needles.
We are having difficulty retrieving article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings .
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode, please exit and log in to your Times account, or subscribe to the entire Times.
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