Kent Campbell, a key figure in the global fight against malaria – especially in Africa, where he led an progressive program to supply bed nets to guard villagers from mosquitoes that carry the disease – died on February 20 in Oro Valley, Arizona. suburb of Tucson. He was 80 years old.
His children stated that his death in a care facility was resulting from cancer complications.
As chief of the malaria division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 1981 to 1993, and later as an advisor to UNICEF and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Dr. Campbell is credited with helping save lives on multiple continents.
In Zambia, where he began working with the Gates Foundation in 2005 on a program to distribute mosquito nets and newer antimalarial drugs, malaria cases halved in three years. The program was later expanded to over 40 other countries in Africa.
“His legacy in my country is among those who contributed enormously to malaria control and prevention,” Kafula Silumbe, a Zambian public health specialist who worked closely with Dr. Campbell, said in an interview. “It was a collaborative effort, but he was definitely part of that initial impetus.”
Tall and lanky, with a Southern accent that betrayed his Tennessee upbringing, Dr. Campbell stumbled upon something that may result in a four-decade profession in public health.
In 1972, during his pediatric residency in Boston, he joined the CDC as an opponent of the Vietnam War. Shortly thereafter, he was sent to Sierra Leone to assist investigate the outbreak Lassa fevervirulent hemorrhagic virus.
“I’ve never heard of Lassa fever,” he said CDC video story “I probably couldn’t even spell it if they asked me.”
He had no training in the importance and use of personal protective equipment. To relieve the heat, he punched holes in his respiratory apparatus, which he later admitted was a bad idea.
Hoping to learn more about Lassa fever, agency officials sent him to Ireland to conduct serological, or antibody, tests on nuns who had previously worked in Sierra Leone. He traveled there along with his wife Elizabeth (Knight) Campbell, whom he married in 1966.
A number of days later, he almost collapsed resulting from an intense headache, high fever and excruciating sore throat.
Dr. Campbell and his wife then traveled to London to supply him with treatment at a hospital with expertise in tropical diseases. The episode then took a surreal turn: when U.S. officials sent a military cargo plane to retrieve the pair, they carried a spare Apollo space capsule in it, which the Campbells were traveling in as a precaution.
“In hindsight, it’s not clear that I had Lassa fever,” Dr. Campbell said. “But apparently I’m not dead.”
With relief in his life and a newfound appreciation for disease hunting, he remained at the CDC. In 1973, he moved to El Salvador to fight malaria, which had been essentially orphaned by global public health agencies and aid groups.
“He was outraged by the injustice and unfairness of the situation,” said in an interview Laurie Garrett, who wrote about Dr. Campbell in her book “The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance” (1994). “It just didn’t seem right to him that a scourge like malaria, which kills millions of people every year, shouldn’t receive investor interest, concern and global attention because most of the people dying from it are poor.”
Carlos Clinton Campbell III was born on January 9, 1944 in Knoxville, Tenn. His father was a life insurance salesman and his mother, Betty Ann (Murphy) Campbell, ran the household. His parents desired to call him Clint, but his younger sister Ann had trouble pronouncing the name and he ended up calling him Kent.
He took an interest in medicine early on when his sister and mother died of cancer – Ann was 5 years old and their mother when he was in highschool.
He studied biology at Haverford (*80*) in Pennsylvania, graduating in 1966. He received his medical degree from Duke University in 1970, and after completing his pediatric residency, he earned a master’s degree in public health from Harvard University.
Dr. Campbell has traveled around the world, from public health corridors to isolated villages and back again.
“He acted deceptively because of his Southern, laconic appearance,” Ms. Garrett said. “Almost every time you walked into his office, these giant long legs would come up onto the desk and he would lean back in his chair. And because it’s so tall, it would automatically fill, you know, 5 meters of space.
It made him seem calm.
“But once it got going, you could feel it all coming to the surface,” she added. “He was incredibly impatient, and I think that led him to ask important questions and take bold steps to try to help.”
After working at the CDC, Dr. Campbell helped establish the University of Arizona’s college of public health and served as a consultant to several global health organizations. In 2005 he joined PATHa Seattle-based health equity nonprofit as director of the Gates Foundation-funded malaria program in Africa.
As malaria became immune to commonest drugs, he focused on prevention.
“The vector in Africa is essentially a single species found throughout the continent, called Anopheles gambiae,” he said in a statement interview with AllAfrica, the pan-African news organization. “It’s like a superstar among transmitters.”
Two years after Zambia’s mosquito net program began, the country saw a 29 percent reduction in child mortality, in response to PATH.
“To put it from another perspective: nothing matches this, which reflects the number of malaria deaths in Zambia and the effectiveness of mosquito nets in reducing transmission” – Dr. Campbell he said All of Africa. “That’s all I really needed. It was just extraordinary. Clinics emptied during infectious season.”
He left behind his wife; his children, Dr. Kristine Campbell and Dr. Patrick Campbell; his brothers, Robert and John Campbell; his half-sisters, Melissa Hansen and Rebecca Arrants; and 4 grandchildren.
Dr. Campbell retired from PATH in 2015.
“I wasn’t going to fight this infection and disease.” he wrote your skilled profession. “It actually chose me.”
He added: “We decided not to listen to the naive.”
