William H. Foege, Architect of Smallpox Eradication, Dies at 89

William H. Foege, the public health leader who developed the vaccination strategy credited with helping wipe out smallpox and who led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, died on Saturday night at his home in Atlanta. He was 89; Dr. Mark Rosenberg said the cause was congestive heart failure.

As a young C.D.C. consultant in West and Central Africa, Dr. Foege proposed a “surgical” containment approach when vaccine supplies were limited: identify and isolate infected people, vaccinate their contacts and the contacts of those contacts, and target public gathering sites. That method, now known as ring vaccination, grew out of his work in Enugu, Nigeria, where he lived and worked in difficult conditions and by the summer of 1967 had helped eliminate smallpox in eastern Nigeria.

Dr. Foege later helped design and lead eradication efforts in India and was a senior leader in programs that enlisted tens of thousands of investigators and technicians; political challenges threatened the program in 1974 but the surveillance-containment strategy prevailed and the last case in India was eradicated a year later.

The world’s last known smallpox case, he said, was in Somalia in 1978, and two years later the W.H.O. formally declared smallpox eliminated. He directed the C.D.C. from 1977 until 1983 and led the agency’s early response to what became the AIDS epidemic. After leaving government, Dr.

Key Topics

Health, William H. Foege, Ring Vaccination, Smallpox Eradication, Cdc, Nigeria