Joseph B. McCormick

Joseph McCormick Biographical note Joseph B. McCormick is James H. Steele Professor, UT Houston School of Public Health, and was the founding Dean with responsibility for developing the new Brownsville campus. He took that position in January 2001 and remained the Dean until 2019. He was born in Tennessee in 1942 and raised in rural Indiana. He obtained a scholarship to Florida Southern College from which he graduated in 1964 with a double major in chemistry and mathematics, with Honors and with the outstanding awards in both subjects. Though he had been awarded a National Science Foundation grant in physics and accepted for the Peace Corps, he elected instead to attend the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, for a year to acquire sufficient French to enable him to take up a position teaching sciences and mathematics in a secondary school in Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo). The school was in a remote area of Zaire, and in the turbulence of immediate post independence in that country this period gave him the wider experience of life he was seeking. He worked in the local hospital, which gave him an introduction to medicine and particularly an interest in health issues in an international setting. With this in mind, he returned to the United States in 1967 and entered Duke Medical School from which he graduated in 1971, having also obtained an MS from Harvard School of Public Health in 1970, and receiving the Upjohn Award for Community Health. During his medical training he spent two summers, one in Guatemala, where he learnt and used Spanish and in Haiti, where he was able to use his French. His internship and residency were in pediatrics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia under Dr. C. Everett Koop. In 1974 Dr. McCormick joined the US Public Health Commissioned Corps and became an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer (EIS), Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Atlanta, Ga, with he Special Pathogens Branch, Division of Bacterial Diseases, and became acting chief in his second year. He was also a fellow in the Preventive Medicine Residency Program at the Centers for Disease Control. He was involved at this stage with meningococcal meningitis in particular, spending extensive time over two years in Brazil, where he learnt sufficient Portuguese to communicate fluently. On completion of his epidemiology training, he stayed with CDC, moving to the Division of Viral Diseases. He went to West Africa, to found the CDC Lassa Fever Research Project, Sierra Leone, West Africa. Just as he was setting up this project, he was called to go to the Republic of Congo (then Zaire) to join the team investigating the Ebola epidemic of 1976, the very first epidemic that introduced Ebola virus to the world. His knowledge of this country and of the French language allowed him to undertake the difficult task of traveling through remote areas of northern Zaire to reach Sudan in an attempt to establish a connection with a second, concurrent outbreak in Sudan. Again in 1979, he was called on by WHO to lead the investigation of a second Ebola hemorrhagic fever outbreak in Sudan He returned after this investigation to Sierra Leone, living and working for three years in the Eastern Province, conducting extensive and definitive studies of the epidemiology and treatment of Lassa hemorrhagic fever. Data from these years were published in landmark reports in the New England Journal of Medicine in the form of a definitive effective treatment for this disease, and in the Journal of Infectious Diseases which ran a series of four papers discussing the clinical disease, laboratory characteristics, epidemiology and pathophysiology all in the same issue. More than 1500 patients with laboratory confirmed Lassa fever were treated over 13 years, and the Project generated a number of other major publications. The Project is unfortunately no longer functional since rebels from Liberia have now overrun most of Sierra Leone, and the Eastern Province is particularly badly affected. On his return to Atlanta in 1982 Dr. McCormick became Chief, Special Pathogens Branch, Division of Viral Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control, and rapidly attained the rank of Medical Director (Navy Captain 06). He was director of the Biosafety level 4 laboratory at CDC for 8 years, and oversaw the design and inaugurated the current BSL 4 facility at CDC. He was also director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Viral Hemorrhagic Fevers. In 1982 he identified the virus, now called Hantavirus, that causes a worldwide hemorrhagic disease, and causes the Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome in the Americas. During this time he became involved in AIDS and led the original team that did the first AIDS investigation in Africa and established the Project SIDA in Kinshasa, Zaire, and later the Project Retro-Ci in Abidjan, Ivory Coast He co-authored numerous papers in major journals, including Science, and established a key point in the