Kent Campbell, a defining figure in the global fight against malaria — mostly in Africa, where he led an innovative program that provided nets to protect rural villagers from the mosquitoes that carry the disease — died Feb. 20 in Oro Valley, Ariz. . a suburb of Tucson. It was 80.
His death, in a nursing home, was caused by complications from cancer, his children said.
As chief of the malaria branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 1981 to 1993, and later as a consultant to UNICEF and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Dr. Campbell is credited with helping to save lives on many continents.
In Zambia, where he began working on a program with the Gates Foundation in 2005, distributing bed nets and newer antimalarial drugs, malaria cases were cut in half within three years. The program later expanded to more than 40 other countries in Africa.
“His legacy in my country is as one of the people who contributed the most to malaria control and prevention,” Kafula Silumbe, a Zambian public health expert who worked closely with Dr. Campbell. “It was a collaborative effort, but it was definitely part of that initial push.”
Tall and stocky, with a Southern drawl that revealed his Tennessee upbringing, Dr. Campbell stumbled into what would become a four-decade career in public health.
In 1972, during his pediatric residency in Boston, he joined the CDC as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. Shortly thereafter, he was sent to Sierra Leone to help investigate an outbreak of Lassa fever, a virulent hemorrhagic virus.
“I had never heard of Lassa fever,” he said in a CDC history video “I probably couldn’t even write that if they asked me.”
He had little to no training in the importance or use of personal protective equipment. For relief from the intense heat, he punched holes in his breathing apparatus, which he later admitted was a bad idea.
Hoping to learn more about Lassa fever, agency officials sent him to Ireland to conduct serology, or antibody tests, on nuns who had previously worked in Sierra Leone. He traveled there with his wife, Elizabeth (Knight) Campbell, whom he had married in 1966.
A few days later, he nearly collapsed from a severe headache, high fever, and excruciating sore throat.
Dr Campbell and his wife then traveled to London so he could be treated at a hospital specializing in tropical diseases. The episode then took a surreal turn: When US officials sent a military transport plane to retrieve the pair, they included a spare Apollo space capsule, which they boarded as a precaution.
“In retrospect, it’s not clear if I had Lassa fever,” Dr. Campbell later said. “But I clearly didn’t die.”
With a reprieve on life and a new appreciation for disease hunting, he remained at the CDC. He moved to El Salvador in 1973 to tackle malaria, which had been virtually orphaned by global public health agencies and aid groups.
“He was outraged at the unfairness and unfairness of things,” Laurie Garrett, who wrote about Dr. Campbell in her book “The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance” (1994). “It just didn’t seem right to him that a scourge like malaria that killed millions of people every year didn’t get investment, concern and global attention because most of the people dying from it were poor.”
Carlos Clinton Campbell III was born on January 9, 1944 in Knoxville, Tenn. His father was a life insurance salesman and his mother, Betty Ann (Murphy) Campbell, ran the household. His parents wanted to call him Clint, but his younger sister Ann had trouble saying the name and ended up with Kent.
He became interested in medicine early on after his sister and mother died of cancer — Ann when he was 5, their mother when he was in high school.
He studied biology at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, graduating in 1966. He earned his medical degree from Duke University in 1970 and received a master’s degree in public health from Harvard University after completing his pediatric residency there.
Dr. Campbell has bounced around the world, from the corridors of public health to isolated villages and back.
“He had a deceptive demeanor because of his Southern, terse exterior,” Ms. Garrett said. “Almost every time you walked into his office, these giant, long legs would come up on the desk and he’d lean back in his chair. And because he’s so tall, he would automatically fill, you know, 12 feet of space.”
That made him look easy.
“But then, when it started, you could feel everything boiling to the surface,” he added. “He was incredibly impatient and I think that led him to ask big questions and take bold steps to try to help things.”
After his work at the CDC, Dr. Campbell helped establish a college of public health at the University of Arizona and consulted for several global health organizations. In 2005, he joined PATH, a Seattle-based nonprofit health organization, as director of the Gates Foundation-funded malaria program in Africa.
With malaria becoming resistant to the most common drug treatments, he focused on prevention.
“The vector in Africa is basically a single species distributed across the continent called Anopheles gambiae,” he told AllAfrica, a pan-African news organization. “He’s like the superstar of the shows.”
Two years after the net program began in Zambia, the country saw a 29 percent drop in child mortality, according to PATH.
“To put it in perspective: There is nothing to match this, which reflects how much death malaria has caused in Zambia and how powerful bed nets are in reducing transmission,” Dr Campbell told AllAfrica. “That was all it really took. It was simply remarkable. Clinics were evacuated during the period of transmission.”
Dr. Campbell is survived by his wife; his children, Dr. Kristine Campbell and Dr. Patrick Campbell. His brothers, Robert and John Campbell. his stepsisters, Melissa Hansen and Rebecca Arrants; and four grandchildren.
Dr. Campbell retired from PATH in 2015.
“I had not set out to fight this infection and disease,” he wrote of his professional career. “Actually, he chose me.”
He added: “We chose not to listen to the naysayers.”
