Dr. Joel Breman, an infectious disease specialist and member of the original team that helped combat the Ebola virus in 1976, died April 6 at his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He was 87 years old.

His death was confirmed by his son, Matthew, who did not specify the cause.

“We were scared to death,” Dr. Breman, recalling his pioneering mission, told a National Institutes of Health bulletin in 2014, as a new and even deadlier Ebola outbreak broke out that year.

Almost 40 years earlier, his five-person team had just landed in the interior of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in a remote Roman Catholic mission hospital. They faced a viral infection that had no name, whose origin was unknown, and which was accompanied by high fever and bleeding that caused a quick and painful death.

Dr. Breman, sent by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had only what he described to the NIH as “the most basic protective equipment” against the disease, in contrast to the spacesuit-like equipment of full body which was standard in the United States. later outbreak. He and other team members, who worked in intense heat and were bitten by sandflies, “developed rashes and didn’t know if we would get the virus too,” he said.

But he calmly began using the techniques he had perfected on previous missions to Africa, in anti-smallpox initiatives in Guinea and Burkina Faso. He interviewed patients and witnesses, traveling from town to town and house to house. He and his colleagues, he recalled, soon determined that the infection was “transmitted by close contact with infected bodily fluids” and had spread in a rural hospital that used unsterilized needles.

Over a long career, much of it at the Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Breman worked to eradicate deadly tropical diseases such as smallpox, malaria and the guinea worm. But that initial Ebola outbreak, he told an interviewer in 2009, “was the most terrifying epidemic of my entire medical career and possibly of the last century.”

Compared to the subsequent outbreak in West Africa, which lasted more than two years, the Congo (then Zaire) epidemic was quickly contained. There were fewer than 300 deaths, in stark contrast to the more than 11,000 from 2014 to 2016. The relative success in 1976 was due in part to Dr. Breman’s efforts to analyze, contain and isolate this terrifying new virus.

“He was my mentor and the leader of the team,” said Dr. Peter Piot, former director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and himself a pioneering researcher on Ebola and AIDS.

“He already had extensive experience in outbreak investigations and field work,” Dr. Piot continued. “He was a combination of walking encyclopedia and accumulated experience. He had an incredible commitment to solving people’s problems, reaching out to them and listening to them.”

Dr. Breman would spend half an hour or more simply chatting with village notables, about their families and other matters, before moving on to questions about the disease, Dr. Piot said. “He made the connection between human understanding and interaction and data analysis. He had the human factor.”

Dr. Piot especially praised Dr. Breman’s behavior: “He remained calm. This was a pretty stressful time. Many people died. He was very patient with me.”

Dr. Breman spent two months in the Congo and became the mission’s head of surveillance, epidemiology and control. He was then sent by the CDC to help manage the World Health Organization’s smallpox program in Geneva.

In 1980, with smallpox effectively eradicated – “one of the greatest triumphs in the history of medicine,” he called it in a Story Corps interview with his son – Dr. Breman began what he called “a new career” directing the center for disease control. anti-malaria program.

In a memorial tribute on April 9, Dr. Rick Steketee, a member of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, said that in the years that followed, and through new publications, Dr. Breman “wrote book chapters that guide Medicine”. and public health practice around the world and edited textbooks that influenced the practice of infectious disease control and elimination, especially in low-resource countries.” Dr. Breman was president of the society in 2020.

Joel Gordon Breman was born December 1, 1936, in Chicago, the son of Herman Breman, a painting contractor, and Irene (Grant) Breman. When Joel was 7, the family moved to Los Angeles, where his father painted movie sets and his mother bought and sold furniture and property.

Dr. Breman attended Hamilton High School in Los Angeles. He received a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1958 and a medical degree from the University of Southern California in 1965. He earned a degree from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1971.

His first foreign assignment was in Guinea, from 1967 to 1969, when the CDC assigned him to run its smallpox eradication program. That mission fueled a lifelong passion for Africa, Matthew Breman said. Numerous scientific trips followed, often as a consultant to the World Health Organization.

Dr. Breman held several senior positions at the National Institutes of Health, from which he retired in 2010 as Senior Scientist Emeritus.

In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Vicki; his daughter, Johanna Tzur; and six grandchildren.

“My dad loved helping others and thought it was important to help everyone,” Matthew Breman said. “I think that’s one of the reasons he went into medicine.”