{"id":4783,"date":"2024-04-22T20:44:22","date_gmt":"2024-04-22T20:44:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=4783"},"modified":"2024-04-22T21:29:49","modified_gmt":"2024-04-22T21:29:49","slug":"joel-breman-who-helped-stop-an-ebola-outbreak-in-africa-dies-at-87","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=4783","title":{"rendered":"Joel Breman, Who Helped Stop an Ebola Outbreak in Africa, Dies at 87"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Part of a team flown in to fight the deadly virus in 1976, Dr. Breman also worked to stamp out tropical diseases like smallpox, malaria and Guinea worm.<\/p>\n

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Dr. Joel Breman, a specialist in infectious diseases who was a member of the original team that helped combat the Ebola virus in 1976, died on April 6 at his home in Chevy Chase, Md. He was 87.<\/p>\n

His death was confirmed by his son, Matthew, who did not specify a cause.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were scared out of our wits,\u201d Dr. Breman, recollecting his pioneer mission, told a National Institutes of Health newsletter<\/a> in 2014, as a new and even deadlier Ebola outbreak raged that year.<\/p>\n

Nearly 40 years earlier, his team of five had just landed in the interior of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, at a remote Roman Catholic mission hospital. They were up against a viral infection that had no name, whose origin was unknown, and that was accompanied by high fever and bleeding that led to a painful and quick death.<\/p>\n

Dr. Breman, dispatched by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had only what he described to the N.I.H. as \u201cthe most basic protective equipment\u201d against the disease, in contrast to the full-body spacesuit-like gear that was standard in the later outbreak. He and others on the team, laboring in intense heat and bitten by sand flies, \u201cdeveloped rashes and didn\u2019t know if we would catch the virus too,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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But he calmly began deploying the techniques he had honed on earlier missions to Africa, on anti-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 recalled, soon determined that the infection was \u201cspread by close contact with infected body fluids,\u201d and that it had been propagated at a rural hospital that was using unsterilized needles.<\/p>\n

Over a long career, much of it spent at the Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization and the National Institutes for Health, Dr. Breman worked to stamp out deadly tropical diseases like smallpox, malaria and Guinea worm. But that initial Ebola outbreak, he told an interviewer in 2009<\/a>, \u201cwas the scariest epidemic of my entire medical career and possibly of the last century.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Part of a team flown in to fight the deadly virus in 1976, Dr. Breman also worked to stamp out tropical diseases like smallpox, malaria and Guinea worm.Dr. Joel Breman, a specialist in infectious diseases who was a member of the original team that helped combat the Ebola virus in 1976, died on April 6 at his home in Chevy Chase, Md. He was 87.His death was confirmed by his son, Matthew, who did not specify a cause.\u201cWe were scared out of our wits,\u201d Dr. Breman, recollecting his pioneer mission, told a National Institutes of Health newsletter in 2014, as a new and even deadlier Ebola outbreak raged that year.Nearly 40 years earlier, his team of five had just landed in the interior of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, at a remote Roman Catholic mission hospital. They were up against a viral infection that had no name, whose origin was unknown, and that was accompanied by high fever and bleeding that led to a painful and quick death.Dr. Breman, dispatched by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had only what he described to the N.I.H. as \u201cthe most basic protective equipment\u201d against the disease, in contrast to the full-body spacesuit-like gear that was standard in the later outbreak. He and others on the team, laboring in intense heat and bitten by sand flies, \u201cdeveloped rashes and didn\u2019t know if we would catch the virus too,\u201d he said.But he calmly began deploying the techniques he had honed on earlier missions to Africa, on anti-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 recalled, soon determined that the infection was \u201cspread by close contact with infected body fluids,\u201d and that it had been propagated at a rural hospital that was using unsterilized needles.Over a long career, much of it spent at the Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization and the National Institutes for Health, Dr. Breman worked to stamp out deadly tropical diseases like smallpox, malaria and Guinea worm. But that initial Ebola outbreak, he told an interviewer in 2009, \u201cwas the scariest epidemic of my entire medical career and possibly of the last century.\u201dWe are having trouble retrieving the 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\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4785,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4783"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4786,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4783\/revisions\/4786"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}