William Foege, medical pioneer who helped stamp out smallpox, has died

SEATTLE – Dr. William H. Foege, an international public health giant credited as a visionary in the earliest days of Bill and Melinda Gates’ global health programs, and who developed the vaccination strategy that wiped out smallpox, died Saturday. He was 89.

Foege died at his home in the Atlanta area, said Tom Paulson, a longtime friend and former Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter who shared details on behalf of Foege’s family.

“I get all choked up thinking about him because he’s one of the best people I’ve ever met,” Paulson said. “I don’t know anybody that has accomplished as much … and yet he does it very naturally. Not by force.”

Foege was best known for developing a targeted disease eradication approach called “ring vaccination.” It involved vaccinating people in closest proximity to those with smallpox instead of inoculating entire populations. His idea worked, and was so successful that the world was rid of smallpox by 1977.

That same year he became director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, serving until 1983. He then co-founded the Task Force for Global Health, an international nonprofit focused on vaccines, the health workforce, tropical diseases and other public health issues.

Over his decadeslong career in public and global health, Foege’s accomplishments were recognized with several of the most prestigious public health and humanitarian awards. He was the recipient of the Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter Award for Humanitarian Contributions to the Health of Humankind in 2007. In 2012, he was honored with the nation’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The University of Washington’s bioengineering and genome sciences building was named and dedicated in his honor in 2006.

Foege, who went by Bill, was born in Iowa.

The son of a Lutheran minister, he spent several years of his childhood in Chewelah, a small town in Eastern Washington. He took a job at a drugstore when he was 13, where, according to a Nature Medicine paper he wrote in 2001, he got his first glimpse into the “world of science.”

As a teen, he spent much of his time reading, and was particularly fascinated by the works of Albert Schweitzer, a renowned medical missionary and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

During summers off from school, Paulson said, Foege worked as a wildland firefighter. Fighting fires had uncanny symmetry with ideas that later drove his ring-of-containment smallpox strategy, Paulson said.

“The way you fight fires is you burn from the outside into the middle,” Paulson said, referring to a tactic called backburning, which involves setting flame to the area outside the fire’s edge and burning off fuel that would otherwise allow wildfire to spread.

“That’s exactly what he did with vaccines,” Paulson added.

After graduating from Pacific Lutheran University in 1957, Foege went on to study medicine at the University of Washington.

As a student, he worked after class and on Saturdays at Seattle-King County Public Health, where his boss’ enthusiasm “for solving problems in public health, from understanding resistant organisms in hospitals and calculating risks of public swimming pools to developing theories on the causation of cancer,” as he wrote in 2001, inspired him to pursue a career in public health instead of practicing medicine.

He earned his M.D. in 1961 and then worked a short stint as a Peace Corps physician in India. He received a master’s in public health from Harvard University in 1965.

The next year, he was recruited by the CDC to help set up a public health program in Nigeria, and with his wife Paula and son, began work in a region that at the time was home to one of the world’s most intractable smallpox outbreaks.

He went on to lead the CDC under the administrations of President Jimmy Carter and President Ronald Reagan and later worked as the executive director of the Carter Center.

“Building on his pivotal role in the eradication of smallpox and his leadership at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Foege brought to the Carter Center a deep commitment to disease prevention, equity, and service to the world’s most vulnerable communities,” a statement from the Carter Center read. “Thanks in large part to Dr. Foege’s leadership, Guinea worm disease is now poised to become the second human disease in history to be eradicated, following the eradication of smallpox.”

Carter credited Foege with saving millions of lives in a past New York Times interview, officials with the center said.

“Bill Foege was a preeminent public health practitioner who dedicated his life to what he called science in the service of humanity,” Carter said in the interview. “He saved the lives of millions of people around the world.”

Paulson first met Foege after he moved back to Washington and in the late 1990s was working as a senior fellow in the global health program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Paulson, who at the time was a medical and science reporter at the Seattle P-I, said the foundation was still getting its footing. Foege brought a level of seriousness to the foundation’s global health mission, Paulson said.

“I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say (Bill and Melinda Gates) pretty much trusted him 100%,” Paulson said. “He was very influential.”

Foege is survived by his wife Paula, two sons, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, Paulson said.

Hannah Furfaro: hfurfaro@seattletimes.com. Hannah Furfaro is a mental health reporter at The Seattle Times who writes enterprise and investigative stories about Washington’s behavioral health care system.