Carlo Urbani

Carlo Urbani (1956–2003) was an Italian infectious-disease specialist who in February 2003 identified severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) as a new and dangerous illness, alerted the World Health Organization in time to set off a global containment effort, and contracted the disease himself in the course of doing so. Born in Castelplanio in the Marche region of central Italy, he qualified in medicine at the University of Ancona and trained in tropical medicine in Messina.

Urbani spent much of his career on parasitic diseases of the rural poor, working with Médecins Sans Frontières on schistosomiasis in Mauritania and on intestinal worms in Cambodia and Laos. He was president of MSF Italy from 1999 to 2001 and accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on the organization's behalf in Oslo in December 1999.

By 2002 he had moved to Hanoi as a WHO communicable-diseases officer for the Western Pacific. On February 28, 2003, he was called to the French Hospital of Hanoi to examine an American businessman, Johnny Chen, who had arrived from Hong Kong with an unusual pneumonia. Within days the medical staff who had cared for Chen began falling ill themselves. Urbani recognized that this was not ordinary influenza, drafted clinical case definitions, and pressed Vietnamese authorities and his WHO superiors in Geneva to treat the outbreak as an international emergency.

His warning bought health systems in Southeast Asia and beyond several weeks of preparation. On March 11, 2003, he developed symptoms during a flight to Bangkok, was placed in isolation on arrival, and died on March 29 at age forty-six.

The name Carlo is the Italian form of Charles, from Old Germanic karl, "free man." He died a free man, on watch.