The American epidemiologist and Ohio native whose unwavering leadership resulted in the eradication nearly 40 years ago of smallpox, one of the world’s most feared contagious diseases, has died.
Dr. Donald “D.A.” Henderson was 87 when he died Friday at a hospice care facility in Towson, Md., from complications following a hip fracture, Johns Hopkins University said in a statement. Henderson was a former dean of the school’s Bloomberg School of Public Health.
He was most recently employed as a distinguished scholar at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Health Security in Baltimore.
“D.A. Henderson truly changed the world for the better,” the center’s director, Tom Inglesby, said.
Henderson was working on smallpox eradication at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1966 when the World Health Organization chose him to lead the global eradication effort.
The battle was essentially won during a 10-year period, 1967-77, by medical workers using a surveillance-and-containment strategy rather than the mass-vaccination approach used in the past. The smallpox project focused on cases and outbreaks, progressively eliminating the disease from where it still existed in South America, Asia and Africa. The last naturally occurring case of smallpox was diagnosed in Somalia in 1977.
CDC Director Tom Frieden said in an email that Henderson played an instrumental role in smallpox eradication.
“His impressive career contributed to saving millions of lives, and will continue to save lives for generations to come,” he wrote.
Henderson was born Sept. 7, 1928, in Lakewood and graduated from Oberlin College in 1950.