Dr. Paul D. Parkman, whose research helped identify the virus that causes rubella and the development of the vaccine that has prevented rubella epidemics in the United States for more than 50 years, died May 7 at his home in Auburn. He passed away. Finger Lakes region, approximately 90 miles east of Rochester, New York. He was 91 years old.
The cause was lymphoblastic leukemia, said niece Teresa M. Leonardi.
Rubella, also known as rubella because it was classified by German scientists in the 19th century, is a moderate disease for most patients, identified by a red, patchy, often itchy rash. However, during pregnancy, a baby can be born with severe physical and mental disabilities, and it can also cause miscarriage or stillbirth.
When Dr. Parkman was a pediatrics resident at the State University Health Sciences Center in Syracuse (now Upstate Medical University in New York) in the 1950s, he recalled the anguish of showing new mothers the rashes of stillborn babies. Ta. Later, it was probably caused by the mother's rubella infection during pregnancy.
In 1964 and 1965, the rubella epidemic, which occurs every six to nine years, resulted in approximately 11,000 miscarriages, 2,100 infant deaths, and 20,000 infants born with birth defects. Ta.
This was the worst outbreak in 30 years and the last in the United States. The disease was declared eradicated in the Americas in 2015, but has not yet been eradicated in Africa or Southeast Asia.
Rubella virus was identified and isolated in the early 1960s by Dr. Parkman and colleagues at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Maryland, and a research team at Harvard University led by Thomas H. Weller.
In 1966, Dr. Parkman, Dr. Harry M. Meyer, Jr., and collaborators at the National Institutes of Health, including Maurice R. Hillman, announced that they had completed a vaccine to prevent rubella. Dr. Parkman and Dr. Meyer transferred their patents to the NIH so that the vaccine could be rapidly manufactured, distributed, and administered.
“We never made a dime from those patents because we wanted them to be freely available to everyone,” he said in a 2005 NIH oral history interview.
President Lyndon B. Johnson thanked the researchers, saying they could “directly and measurably advance human welfare, save precious lives, and bring new hope to the world.” “There are very few people,” he said.
Still, after Dr. Parkman retired from the government in 1990 as director of the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, he expressed concern about what he called persistent and unfounded skepticism about the value of vaccines.
“Aside from safe drinking water, vaccines are the most successful medical intervention of the 20th century,” he wrote in Food and Drug Administration Consumer Magazine in 2002.
“When I look back on my career, I start to think maybe I was part of the easy part,” he added. “The difficult task of maintaining the protection we have worked so hard to achieve will fall to others. We must stop the spread of this vaccine nihilism. If it becomes widespread, our success could be lost.”
Paul Douglas Parkman was born in Auburn on May 29, 1932, and raised in nearby Weedsport, a village of about 1,200 people. His father, Stuart, was a postal worker who served on the village school board and kept poultry to support his son's education. His mother, Mary (Crump) Parkman, ran the family finances.
In 1955, Paul married his kindergarten classmate, Ermelina Leonardi. She is his only survivor. He was preceded in death by his brother Stuart and his sister Phyllis Parkman Thompson.
He enrolled in an accelerated degree program and earned a bachelor's degree in pre-medicine from St. Lawrence University in Canton. He received his medical degrees from the State University of New York Health Sciences Center, both of which he earned in 1957.
In 1960, he joined the Army Medical Corps as a captain. From 1963 he served as head of the NIH's Division of General Virology until that division was absorbed by the Food and Drug Administration in 1972, after he worked as a researcher at the Walter Reed Research Institute. There, as director of the Center for Biological Products, he oversaw policies for HIV/AIDS testing and the approval of vaccines for the most common cause of bacterial meningitis, and strengthened oversight of blood banks. He retired in 1990 as director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.
Dr. Parkman trained as a pediatrician. His rise to specializing in viruses was both fortuitous and inauspicious.
While stationed at Fort Dix, New Jersey, he was assigned to study the seasonal surge in cases of cold and flu among recruits.
“A runny nose is nothing to worry about,” Dr. Parkman said in an oral history interview. Although he fell in love with virology, he returned to Washington hoping for a more difficult subject than the common cold. he found it.
