Dr Daniel Tarantola

Spanning over 50 years, Prof Daniel Tarantola’s public health career built around the prevention and control of communicable diseases of international and global health significance. It included two intertwined periods: 1974-1992 and 1999-2004, during which he was a WHO staff member over 24 years; and 1983-1998 and 2004-to-date, during which he practiced teaching, mentoring, research and publishing at the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, USA, and the School of Public Health and Community Medicine at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

He joined the Organization in the 1970’s as a medical officer and later as the Team Leader of the WHO Smallpox Eradication Programme in Bangladesh. He had the privilege, in 1975, of overseeing outbreak containment and surveillance around the last case of naturally occurring variola major in human history. Towards the end of his career in WHO and before returning to academia, Daniel Tarantola was a Senior Policy Adviser to the Director General as well-as the Director of the Department of Vaccines, Immunization and Biologicals at WHO Headquarters, Geneva.

He has served on numerous occasions as a consultant or a Temporary Adviser to WHO, UNAIDS, UNDP, the World Bank and other international and non-governmental organizations. Among the projects Prof. Tarantola has actively engaged in, and have marked his career, are: (a) The Global eradication of Smallpox; (b) The expansion of childhood immunization in Asia, the Pacific and Africa; (c) The strategic formulation and world coverage of the WHO Global Programme on HIV/AIDS (d) His contribution to the founding and work of the Harvard School of Public Health FXB Center for Health and Human Rights where he directed the International AIDS Program; (e) His contribution to the development of a Global Action Plan for the “Decade of Vaccine”, with a focus on immunization delivery systems; (f) The strengthening and rehabilitation of health systems in war-affected countries and those hosting refugees in Africa, Asia and the Middle-East; (g) The elimination of polio from Africa; and (h) The “Mainstreaming of Equity, Gender and Human Rights” in the work of WHO.

Prof Tarantola served as a member of the Technical Review Panel (TRP) of the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria (2010-2018).

His current field of interest spans across: global and international health; public health policy and strategic evaluation and formulation; immunization and health systems development; HIV/AIDS; COVID-19; and the interface of health, human security and development, and human rights.

For the past 22 years, Prof. Tarantola has served as a dedicated International Associate Editor of the American Journal of Public Health. Prof. Tarantola is a Life-Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, London, U.K.since 2016. His publications include over 200 articles, book chapters and books notably, with co-editors and co-authors, the extensively cited "AIDS in the World" (Harvard University Press, 1992) and “AIDS in the World II” (Oxford University press, 1996), in which the first ever comprehensive data analyses of the HIV pandemic and of the responses brought against it were presented. He is a contributor to several Public Health Encyclopaedias. A full list of publications can be provided on request.