Dr. William Foege, leader in smallpox eradication, dies
Source: AP
Updated 11:54 AM EST, January 25, 2026
ATLANTA (AP) — Dr. William Foege, a leader of one of humanity’s greatest public health victories — the global eradication of smallpox — has died. Foege died Saturday in Atlanta at the age of 89, according to the Task Force for Global Health, which he co-founded.
The 6-foot-7 inch Foege literally stood out in the field of public health. A whip-smart medical doctor with a calm demeanor, he had a canny knack for beating back infectious diseases. He was director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and later held other key leadership roles in campaigns against international health problems. But his greatest achievement came before all that, with his work on smallpox, one of the most lethal diseases in human history.
For centuries, it killed about one-third of the people it infected and left most survivors with deep scars on their faces from the pus-filled lesions. Smallpox vaccination campaigns were well established by the time Foege was a young doctor. Indeed, it was no longer seen in the United States. But infections were still occurring elsewhere, and efforts to stamp them out were stalling.
Working as a medical missionary in Nigeria in the 1960s, Foege and his colleagues developed a “ring containment” strategy, in which a smallpox outbreak was contained by identifying each smallpox case and vaccinating everyone who the patients might come into contact with.
Read more: https://apnews.com/article/william-foege-smallpox-cdc-73770ffe382e48829a87fee0b364a3d1
I suppose all of his work on containment strategies will be all for naught now.
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of vaccinating those living on the outskirts of communities, which resulted in creating a rapid buffer zone to stave off the spread of these highly contagious diseases. The result allowed time for the disease to naturally fizzle out without needing to vaccinate an entire, often difficult to access population. 