Carlo Urbani

Carlo Urbani was born on 19 October 1956 in Castelplanio, in Italy's Ancona province. He earned his medical degree from the University of Ancona in 1981 and went on to train in infectious diseases at the University of Messina, having already travelled to Africa during medical school to study malaria and other parasites. From 1990 he served as deputy chief of the infectious diseases department at the Macerata hospital in Italy while continuing to take on overseas public-health missions. In 1993 the World Health Organization enlisted him to research hookworm in the Maldives, and he went on to be the first to report transmission of Schistosoma mansoni in Mauritania. He joined Médecins Sans Frontières in 1995, working in Cambodia to control Schistosoma mekongi, and in 1999 was among the MSF delegation that accepted that year's Nobel Peace Prize on the organisation's behalf. After further postings in the Philippines and Phnom Penh, he accepted a long-term position as a WHO public-health specialist in Hanoi in May 2000.

On 26 February 2003, Johnny Chen, a Chinese-American businessman, was admitted to Hanoi's Vietnam-France Hospital with a suspected case of influenza. Urbani examined him on 28 February and concluded this was not ordinary influenza but a previously unseen, highly transmissible disease. Over the following days he remained at the hospital, documenting the case, arranging for samples to be sent for testing, and helping strengthen infection-control measures, while also filing a report with the WHO — directly prompting the organisation to issue its first global SARS alert on 12 March 2003. Urbani's timely reporting and the infection-control measures put in place at the hospital helped make Vietnam one of the first countries to contain SARS effectively.

On 11 March 2003, as he flew from Hanoi to a paediatric parasitology conference in Bangkok, Urbani began to feel feverish. On landing, he told a CDC colleague who had come to meet him not to approach, and the two sat apart in silence while an ambulance was arranged with protective equipment. He spent the following 18 days fighting the illness in an improvised isolation ward at a Bangkok hospital and died on 29 March 2003, aged 46. Days earlier, when his wife Giuliana had asked whether he should avoid such close contact with severely ill patients, Urbani had replied, 'If I cannot even work in such situations, what am I here for? Answering emails, going to cocktail parties, or pushing paper?' The WHO later named the first isolated and identified strain of the SARS coronavirus after him — the 'Urbani strain.'