2002/07/01 by Stephen L. Hoffman · 1 citation
Business, Management and Accounting · Medicine · #Anachronism #Attendance #Global Health and Surgery #Global Public Health Policies and Epidemiology #History #Hygiene #Law #Medicine #Political science #Politics #Sociology #Travel-related health issues #Wife
paper · doi:10.4269/ajtmh.2002.67.1
openalex publication_date 2002/07/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/01/13
Fellow members of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH), distinguished guests, and friends: In considering what I would say today, I thought back over the 23 years that I have been a member of our Society. During that period I have lived and worked in many different parts of the world, have worn many different professional hats, and participated in the meetings of many different societies, but there has only been one society’s annual meeting that I have never missed in my entire professional career, the meeting of the ASTMH. I have to tell you that I tried these first few lines out on my wife, Kim Lee Sim, a few days ago, and her response was, big deal, I’m a lot younger than you are and I’ve been at the last 17 consecutive meetings! In fact I am certain that there are many here today who have both of us beaten in terms of attendance records. The ASTMH has been a home and huge extended family for me, and it has been incredibly enriching and fulfilling to be able to be part of such a group. There are few, if any, other societies of which such a high percentage of the members have dedicated their professional careers to improving the health of the least served residents of our planet. Tropical medicine has been the integrating force and constant in a career that has taken me from civilian life in a Tropical Medicine and Traveler’s Clinic at the University of California at San Diego into the United States Navy, and 21 years later back into civilian life at Celera Genomics; from clinical medicine into clinical investigation, clinical epidemiology, immunology, vaccinology, genomics, and now proteomics, and from South America to Southeast Asia and Oceania to Africa, and now to Rockville, Maryland. It has been a career that brought me my wife and wonderful friends from all over the world, many of whom are here today. A career that allowed me in 1980 to walk into a hospital in Jakarta, Indonesia in which 15% of all patients admitted with typhoid fever died, and leave four and a half years later knowing that the work of my colleagues, especially Dr. Narain Punjabi who is here today, and I had led to a reduction of that case fatality rate to 1%. Twenty-three years ago, listening to Irv Kagan give the presidential address at my first ASTMH meeting in Chicago, it was beyond my imagination that I would someday be standing before you giving a presidential address. I cannot begin to describe what an incredible honor it has been for me to have had the opportunity to serve our Society as president during the past year, and the depth of emotions I feel standing up here addressing you today. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for allowing me to do so. Before moving into the substance of my talk, I want to mention one regret that I have today. On all previous occasions that I have addressed our Society I have proudly worn the uniform of the United States Navy. As a recent retiree, I do not have that privilege. At a time when so many in the United States and around the world are recognizing the importance of service to their countries, I am saddened that I am not wearing my uniform. However, I must point out how many of us in this room are or were members of the uniformed services of our country. I am certain that no other non-military biomedical society of our size in the world has such a high percentage of its membership drawn from the active uniformed services. The impact during the last 100 years of scientists and physicians from the United States uniformed services on the health of underserved people in the tropics has been enormous, is unprecedented elsewhere in the world, and a concrete example of the outward looking, generous nature of the United States. Paul Russell, an eminent malariologist, who was the president of the ASTMH 50 years ago when the American Malaria Society and the American Society of Tropical Hygiene merged to form the ASTMH, used his presidential address to speak entirely about the importance of population control in the developing world, not about research or control measures in tropical infectious diseases. Professor Russell died in 1983, so I wasn’t able to ask him why he spoke about population control instead of the area that he devoted his life’s work to, malaria. However, I suspect that to some degree, it was because, like so many before and so many since, he had underestimated how difficult it was to actually deal effectively and sustainably with tropical infectious diseases. At that time DDT was being introduced to reduce the longevity of Anopheles mosquitoes, and chloroquine, one of the best antimalarials ever developed, was being introduced to treat and prevent infections with all four species of Plasmodium that were known to cause disease in humans. The stage was set for an ambitious international campaign to eradicate malaria. In fact, in 1955 Dr. Russell published a book entitled Man’s Mastery of Malaria, and by 1962 the United States had issued a stamp and envelope celebrating the international malaria eradication program (Figure 1). This campaign was extremely effective in North America and Europe, and initially incredibly effective in Latin America and south Asia. However, it has often been stated that in a number of developing countries the early success of the malaria eradication programs led to the eradication of malariologists not eradication of the disease. Dr. Russell wrote in the preface of his 1955 book: “While keeping in mind the realities one can nevertheless be confident that malaria is well on its way toward oblivion. Already as a malariologist, I feel premonitory twinges of lonesomeness, and in my own organization I am now a sort of ‘last survivor’.” In fact I have been told by numerous individuals that dur* Presented as the Presidential Lecture at the 50th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, Atlanta, GA, November 13, 2001. Am. J. Trop. Med. Hyg., 67(1), 2002, pp. 1–7 Copyright © 2002 by The American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene