Paul Farmer, a giant of public health, dies at 62

4 yıl önce

Paul Farmer, a physician who devoted his professional life to improving health care in the most destitute corners of the world, a campaign that brought him international renown and was credited with improving if not saving millions of lives, died Feb. 21 in Butaro, Rwanda. He was 62.

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His death was announced by Partners in Health, the global health organization that he co-founded in 1987, which said that the cause was “an acute cardiac event while he was sleeping.”

Sometimes described as a modern-day Albert Schweitzer, Dr. Farmer was a doctor, a humanitarian and, by all accounts, an almost otherworldly force whose aspirations for global public health seemed unattainable until he showed they were within reach. He was the subject of a widely read 2013 book by Tracy Kidder, “Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World.”

Dr. Farmer first traveled to Haiti, one of the poorest nations in the world, as a volunteer in the early 1980s, just as he embarked on his studies at Harvard Medical School. He went on to found a network of 15 clinics and hospitals that now serve more than 1.3 million people in the most remote reaches of the country, according to Partners in Health. Dr. Farmer was personally engaged in that medical care, at times trekking many miles to make a single house call.

His work in Haiti expanded into the global mission of Partners in Health, which today works in a dozen locations across Africa, Central Asia, Latin America and the United States, where the group has assisted in recent years with the response to the coronavirus pandemic.

“He really stands out as one of the most influential global health figures of our time, and I don’t think that’s a hyperbole,” Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the chief medical adviser to President Biden, said in an interview.

“He sacrificed personal comfort to go into the trenches with the people he cared for,” Fauci continued, describing Dr. Farmer as a “once-in-a-lifetime person.”

“He loved the people he took care of,” Fauci said, “and they loved him back.”

A complete obituary will be published soon.