Dr. J. Donald Millar, 81, Dies; Led C.D.C. Mission That Helped Eradicate Smallpox
New York Times, SEPT. 3, 2015
By MARGALIT FOX
Dr. J. Donald Millar, a physician and former public-health official whose work helped eradicate smallpox in Africa and with it, the world, died on Sunday at his home in Murrayville, Ga. He was 81. The apparent cause was kidney failure, his wife, Joan, said.

A retired assistant surgeon general of the United States Public Health Service, Dr. Millar (pronounced mil-LAHR) was long associated with what is now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He was the first director of its global smallpox eradication program, a position he held from 1966 to 1970.

Dr. Millar was later a director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

The last case of smallpox in the United States occurred in 1949, but when Dr. Millar assumed his post, the disease remained an urgent international health concern: From 1880 to 1980, it killed a half-billion people worldwide.

The C.D.C. (known in the late 1960s as the National Communicable Disease Center) began its overseas eradication campaign in West and Central Africa. From the center’s offices in Atlanta, Dr. Millar oversaw the training, deployment and support of dozens of health workers in some 20 countries there. Many, like Sierra Leone, Guinea, Niger and Togo, then had some of the highest rates of smallpox in the world.

Operating under the aegis of the World Health Organization, Dr. Millar’s program focused on locations, like marketplaces and festival sites, where inhabitants of remote rural settlements came together in large numbers. There, local workers trained by his staff gave smallpox vaccinations to as many people as possible.

Eventually, some 4,000 Africans were trained to administer the vaccine. By 1969, The New York Times reported, Dr. Millar’s program had vaccinated 100 million people in the region.

“This was considered to be the most difficult area of the world, because of communications and transportation and so forth,” Dr. William H. Foege, a former director of the C.D.C. who in the 1960s worked under Dr. Millar in Nigeria, said on Thursday. “The objective was to stop smallpox within five years, and the goal was actually reached in three and a half years.”

The Africa program became a model for smallpox eradication campaigns in other countries, among them India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Brazil…