Hi, Atlanta!

Dr. Bill Foege, a giant of public health who spent much of his career in Atlanta, died last weekend at age 89. Foege’s greatest achievement was developing and implementing the strategy to first contain and then eradicate smallpox globally by 1980. 

Foege played an important role in building Atlanta’s global health establishment, first at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, then at The Carter Center and The Task Force for Global Health. 

“He was in my mind the consciousness of public health in America,” Dr. Georges Benjamin, the president of the American Public Health Association said Monday. Foege served as president of the organization in 1986. “He was a force to be reckoned with and wise counsel, and he will be missed.” 

Foege shared his public health origin story with me last year when I spoke to him after former President Jimmy Carter’s death. It started when Foege was confined to a body cast due to a hip injury as a teenager.

Being immobilized — without television — he read widely, including about Dr. Albert Schweitzer, a German theologian and musician who earned a medical degree and founded a hospital in what is now Gabon.  

“I became so intrigued by what he was doing that I became interested in Africa, global health,” Foege said. 

Back then, he said, not many people were interested in the field, but he found a mentor in Ray Ravenholt, who led the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Office of Population from 1966 to 1980. 

“‘If you’re really interested in global health, there is no pathway. You have to create your own’,” Foege recalled Ravenholt advising him. And Foege did just that. 

He joined the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service — and then developed a global strategy for containing and eliminating smallpox. 

Foege went on to become director of the CDC in 1977. He maintained a sense of the possible in the early days of what became The Task Force for Global Health, headquartered in Atlanta. He helped co-found the Task Force 1984, under a different name (The Task Force for Child Survival), to ensure that children around the world received vaccines for preventable diseases. 

Foege recalled being told to steer clear of what came to be called pharmacophilanthropy when the organization expanded its work into distributing drugs donated by pharmaceutical companies. But he persisted, and The Task Force has since helped distribute more than 2.8 billion doses of a drug to treat river blindness, eliminating the disease in four countries. 

Foege also served as executive director of The Carter Center from 1986 to 1992. 

Foege ended last year’s interview by telling me about what he saw as the purpose of global health work. 

“You have one objective, which is global health equity,” he said. “Those words, you can't take any of those three away and have it mean the same thing, and you can add 200 and not improve on it.” 

Looking for your next read? Check out these other great newsletters.