Foege, a physician known for his calm demeanor and for work that helped turn smallpox eradication into a reality, died Saturday in Atlanta at 89, according to the Task Force for Global Health. The nonprofit, co-founded by Foege, said he was 6 feet 7 inches tall and had become a leading figure in one of the biggest public health victories in history: the global elimination of smallpox.
The report says Foege later served as director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the late 1970s and early 1980s. After that role, he took on other leadership positions in international public health, including serving as executive director at The Carter Center and as a senior member of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
But the centerpiece of Foege’s legacy came earlier, the report said, through his work on smallpox. It describes smallpox as a disease that for centuries killed about a third of those infected and left many survivors with deep facial scars from pus-filled lesions.
Campaigns for smallpox vaccination had already taken hold in the United States by the time Foege was a young doctor, the report said. While the disease was no longer seen in the U.S., it persisted elsewhere and efforts to eradicate it were stalling, creating a need for tactics that could work with limited resources.
The report says that in the 1960s, while working as a medical missionary in Nigeria, Foege and colleagues developed the “ring containment” strategy. Under that approach, an outbreak was contained by identifying each smallpox case and vaccinating everyone the patients could come into contact with, relying heavily on rapid detection. Foege wrote in his 2011 book “House on Fire” that the strategy emerged because there simply were not enough vaccines to immunize everyone.
According to the report, the approach proved crucial to clearing the final barrier to eradication. The last case of naturally occurring smallpox emerged in Somalia in 1977, and in 1980 the World Health Organization declared the disease eradicated from Earth.
In a statement responding to his death, Dr. Patrick O’Carroll, chief executive of the Task Force for Global Health, said the organization sought to honor Foege’s commitment “to improve the health of people around the world, through strong coalitions and with a defined purpose that applied the best available science.” O’Carroll added that the group tried to carry out that commitment “in each of our programs, every day.”
The report also quoted Dr. Tom Frieden, a former CDC director who said he consulted Foege regularly. Frieden said that measured by “the simple metric of who has saved the most lives,” Foege “is at the level of the pantheon,” adding that smallpox eradication “has avoided hundreds of millions of deaths,” the report said.
Foege was born March 12, 1936. The report says his father was a Lutheran minister, and that Foege became interested in medicine at 13 while working in a pharmacy in Colville, Washington. He earned his medical degree from the University of Washington in 1961 and a master’s in public health from Harvard in 1965.
His later career milestones included serving as CDC director from 1977 to 1983, the report said. It also notes that in 2012 President Barack Obama awarded Foege the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, and that in 2016 Duke University President Richard Brodhead, at an honorary degree ceremony, called him “the father of global health.”
The report credited Jack Dura for contributions from Bismarck, North Dakota, and said the story was translated from English by an AP editor with the help of a generative artificial intelligence tool.