Carlo Urbani

Carlo Urbani (19 October 1956 – 29 March 2003) was an Italian infectious disease specialist and member of Médecins Sans Frontières, working in Hanoi, Vietnam under a WHO commission at the time of the SARS outbreak. In late February 2003, while investigating an unusual pneumonia cluster centred on an American businessman at a Hanoi hospital, he identified the disease as something previously unseen and highly transmissible, and immediately filed a report with the WHO — directly prompting the WHO to issue its first global SARS alert on 12 March 2003. His timely reporting helped make Vietnam one of the first countries to effectively contain SARS. He himself contracted SARS during the investigation and died in Bangkok, Thailand on 29 March 2003, aged 46. The WHO subsequently named the first isolated and identified SARS coronavirus strain after him.