Kent Campbell, an instrumental determine within the international struggle in opposition to malaria — maximum significantly in Africa, the place he led an cutting edge program offering mattress nets to offer protection to rural villagers from the mosquitoes sporting the illness — died on Feb. 20 in Oro Valley, Ariz., a suburb of Tucson. He was once 80.
His loss of life, in a nursing care facility, was once brought about by means of headaches of most cancers, his youngsters mentioned.
As leader of the malaria department of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 1981 to 1993, and later as an adviser to UNICEF and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Dr. Campbell is credited with serving to to save lots of lives on a couple of continents.
In Zambia, the place he started operating on a program with the Gates Foundation in 2005 distributing mattress nets and more recent antimalarial medicine, malaria instances had been minimize in part inside of 3 years. The program was once later expanded to greater than 40 different international locations in Africa.
“His legacy in my country is as one of the people who greatly contributed to the control and prevention of malaria,” Kafula Silumbe, a Zambian public well being specialist who labored carefully with Dr. Campbell, mentioned in an interview. “It was a collective effort, but he definitely was part of that initial push.”
Tall and lanky, with a Southern drawl that exposed his Tennessee upbringing, Dr. Campbell came across what would develop into a four-decade-long profession in public well being.
In 1972, throughout his pediatric residency in Boston, he joined the C.D.C. as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. Not lengthy after, he was once despatched to Sierra Leone to lend a hand examine a deadly disease of Lassa fever, a virulent hemorrhagic virus.
“I had never heard of Lassa fever,” he mentioned in a video historical past of the C.D.C. “Probably couldn’t even spell it if I’d been asked to.”
He had little to no coaching within the significance or use of private protecting apparatus. For reduction from the serious warmth, he poked holes in his respiring equipment, which he later admitted was once a foul thought.
Hoping to be informed extra about Lassa fever, company officers dispatched him to Ireland to behavior serologic, or antibody-detecting, assessments on nuns who had prior to now labored in Sierra Leone. He traveled there along with his spouse, Elizabeth (Knight) Campbell, whom he had married in 1966.
A couple of days later, he just about collapsed from an intense headache, prime fever and an excruciating sore throat.
Dr. Campbell and his spouse then traveled to London so he might be handled at a clinic with experience in tropical sicknesses. The episode then took a surreal flip: When U.S. officers despatched an army delivery airplane to retrieve the couple, they integrated a spare Apollo area pill, which they rode in as a precautionary measure.
“In retrospect, it’s not clear whether I had Lassa fever,” Dr. Campbell later mentioned. “But clearly I didn’t die.”
With a reprieve on lifestyles and a newfound appreciation for illness looking, he stayed on with the C.D.C. He moved to El Salvador in 1973 to tackle malaria, which have been necessarily orphaned by means of international public well being businesses and assist teams.
“He was indignant about the injustice and unfairness of things,” Laurie Garrett, who wrote about Dr. Campbell in her e book “The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance” (1994), mentioned in an interview. “It just didn’t seem right to him that a scourge like malaria that was killing millions of people every single year wasn’t getting investment and concern and global attention because most of the people dying of it were poor.”
Carlos Clinton Campbell III was once born on Jan. 9, 1944, in Knoxville, Tenn. His father was once a lifestyles insurance coverage salesman, and his mom, Betty Ann (Murphy) Campbell, controlled the family. His folks sought after to name him Clint, however his more youthful sister, Ann, had hassle pronouncing the identify, and he wound up as Kent.
He took an early passion in medication after his sister and mom each died from most cancers — Ann when she was once 5, their mom when he was once in highschool.
He studied biology at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, graduating in 1966. He earned his scientific level from Duke University in 1970 and gained a grasp’s in public well being at Harvard University after finishing his pediatric residency there.
Dr. Campbell bounced world wide, from the corridors of public well being to remoted villages, and again.
“He had a deceptive demeanor because of his Southern, laconic exterior,” Ms. Garrett mentioned. “Almost every time you’d go into his office, these gigantic, long legs would go up on the desk and he’d lean back in his chair. And because he’s so tall, he would automatically fill up, you know, 12 feet of space.”
This made him appear easygoing.
“But then, when he got going, you could feel everything boiling up to the surface,” she added. “He was incredibly impatient, and I think that drove him to ask big questions and to take bold steps to try and help things.”
Following his paintings on the C.D.C., Dr. Campbell helped create a faculty of public well being on the University of Arizona and consulted for a number of international well being organizations. In 2005, he joined PATH, a well being fairness nonprofit primarily based in Seattle, as director of the malaria program in Africa funded by means of the Gates Foundation.
With malaria changing into immune to the commonest drug remedies, he excited by prevention.
“The vector in Africa is basically a single species that is distributed all over the continent called Anopheles gambiae,” he mentioned in an interview with AllAfrica, a Pan-African information group. “It is like the superstar of transmitters.”
Two years after the bed-net program started in Zambia, the rustic noticed a 29 % lower in kid mortality, in step with PATH.
“To put that in perspective: There’s nothing matching that, which is reflective of how much death malaria caused in Zambia and how powerful bed nets are to decrease transmission,” Dr. Campbell informed AllAfrica. “That’s all it really took. It was just remarkable. Clinics emptied out during the transmission season.”
Dr. Campbell is survived by means of his spouse; his youngsters, Dr. Kristine Campbell and Dr. Patrick Campbell; his brothers, Robert and John Campbell; his stepsisters, Melissa Hansen and Rebecca Arrants; and 4 grandchildren.
Dr. Campbell retired from PATH in 2015.
“I hadn’t set out to battle this infection and disease,” he wrote of his skilled profession. “In reality, it chose me.”
He added, “We chose not to listen to the naysayers.”
