Dr. Joel Breman, an infectious disease specialist and member of the original team that helped combat the Ebola virus in 1976, died April 6 at his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He was 87 years old.
His death was confirmed by his son Matthew, who said his father died of complications from kidney cancer.
“We were terrified,” said Dr. Breman, who recalled his pioneering mission, in a 2014 National Institutes of Health newsletter as a new and even deadlier Ebola outbreak raged that year.
Nearly forty years earlier, his team of five had just landed in the interior of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, at a remote Roman Catholic mission hospital. They were confronted with an unnamed viral infection, the origin of which was unknown, and which was accompanied by high fever and bleeding that led to a painful and rapid death.
Dr. Breman, dispatched by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had only what he described to the NIH as “the most basic protective equipment” against the disease, as opposed to the full-body spacesuit-like gear that was standard in the later outbreak. He and others on the team, who had to work in the intense heat and were bitten by sand flies, “developed rashes and didn’t know if we would catch the virus too,” he said.
But he calmly began applying the techniques he had honed during previous missions to Africa, on anti-smallpox initiatives in Guinea and Burkina Faso. He interviewed patients and witnesses, traveled from village to village and went from house to house. He and his colleagues, he recalled, soon learned that the infection was “spread by close contact with infected bodily fluids,” and that the disease had spread in a rural hospital that used unsterilized needles.
Over a long career, much of which was spent at the Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization, and the National Institutes for Health, Dr. Breman to eradicate deadly tropical diseases such as smallpox, malaria and the Guinea worm. But that first Ebola outbreak, he told an interviewer in 2009, “was the scariest epidemic of my entire medical career and possibly of the last century.”
Compared to the later outbreak in West Africa, which lasted more than two years, the epidemic in Congo (then Zaire) was quickly brought under control. There were fewer than 300 deaths, in stark contrast to the more than 11,000 between 2014 and 2016. The relative success in 1976 was partly due to the efforts of Dr. Breman to analyze, contain and isolate this terrifying new virus.
“He was my mentor and the leader of the team,” says Dr. Peter Piot, former director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and himself a pioneering Ebola and AIDS researcher.
“He already had a lot of experience in outbreak investigation and fieldwork,” continued Dr. Piot. “He was a combination of walking encyclopedia and accumulated experience. He had an incredible commitment to solving problems for people, reaching people and listening to them.”
Dr. Breman spent half an hour or more talking to village nobles, about their families and other matters, before turning to questions about the disease, said Dr. Piot. “He made the connection between human understanding and interaction, and data analysis. He had the human factor.”
Dr. Piot had special praise for Dr.’s attitude. Breman: “He remained calm. This was quite a stressful time. Many people died. He was very patient with me.”
Dr. Breman spent two months in Congo and became head of the mission’s surveillance, epidemiology and control. He was then sent by the CDC to help implement the World Health Organization’s smallpox program in Geneva.
In 1980, with smallpox effectively eradicated—”one of the greatest triumphs in the history of medicine,” he called it in a Story Corps interview with his son—Dr. Breman embarked on what he called “a new career” leading the disease control center. antimalarial program.
During a memorial tribute on April 9, Dr. Rick Steketee, a fellow member of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, that Dr. Breman in the years that followed, and through new posts, “wrote book chapters that guide medicine and public health practice around the world and edited textbooks that influenced the practice of infectious disease control and elimination, especially in resource-poor countries.” Dr. Breman was president of the association in 2020.
Joel Gordon Breman was born in Chicago on December 1, 1936, the son of Herman Breman, a painting contractor, and Irene (Grant) Breman. When Joel was seven, the family moved to Los Angeles, where his father painted movie sets and his mother bought and sold furniture and property.
Dr. Breman attended Hamilton High School in Los Angeles. He received a BA in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1958 and a medical degree from the University of Southern California in 1965. In 1971, he received a degree from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
His first overseas assignment was in Guinea, from 1967 to 1969, when the CDC assigned him to implement the smallpox eradication program. That mission has sparked a lifelong passion for Africa, says Matthew Breman. Numerous scientific trips followed, often as an advisor to the World Health Organization.
Dr. Breman held a number of senior positions at the National Institutes of Health, retiring in 2010 as a senior scientist emeritus.
In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Vicki; his daughter, Johanna Tzur; and six grandchildren.
“My father loved helping others and felt it was important to help everyone,” Matthew Breman said. “I think that’s one of the reasons he went to medical school.”