Fred Brown, 79, authority on foot-and-mouth disease
LOS ANGELES -- Fred Brown, considered by many the preeminent authority on foot-and-mouth disease in Britain and the United States, died Feb. 20 of an apparent heart attack at his home in Surrey, England. He was 79.
Over the past half century, Dr. Brown's research transformed the debate over how to contain foot-and-mouth disease, the virus that affects cloven-hoofed livestock such as sheep, cattle, and swine.
"He will be remembered as a pioneer behind a new generation of safe vaccines and fast, discriminating diagnostic tests," said Roger Breeze, of the US Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service.
While not necessarily lethal for animals, foot-and-mouth disease depletes livestock. Weight gain drops in meat animals and milk output falls in dairy ones, sharply reducing their value to farmers. It is so devastating to the economies of milk- and meat-producing countries that their governments have traditionally resorted to mass slaughter to contain it.
Dr. Brown devoted his career to eradicating it by more humane means: using vaccines.
Dr. Brown saw the practice of not immunizing animals as not just immoral but risky. With foot-and-mouth incipient throughout Asia, South America, and Africa, he saw it as a matter of time before it wreaked disaster in the United States. Twice in his career, he had seen it devastate Britain.
During the peak of the 2001 British foot-and-mouth epidemic, Dr. Brown appeared in media galleries and lecture halls, said Hugh Pennington, medical microbiologist at the University of Aberdeen and the scientist who handled the E. coli inquiries for the British government. "People knew what Fred was going to say would be relevant because he was the man with the proven record and who would speak his mind."
Dr. Brown was the son of a furniture polisher in Clayton, in Lancashire, northwest England. As a result of his roots, observed Breeze, Dr. Brown was "Fred, not Frederick."
Dr. Brown earned his doctorate in chemistry at the University of Manchester in 1948 and taught for several years before joining the Animal Virus Research Institute at Pirbright, England, in 1955. Only a handful of labs are licensed worldwide for scientists to experiment on foot-and-mouth disease, and Pirbright and Plum Island in New York are the two best known.
By 1980, Dr. Brown had reached the top of his profession. He was editor in chief of the Journal of General Virology, author of more than 30 papers in the journal Nature, and a newly elected fellow of the Royal Society, or FRS.
In 1990, Dr. Brown joined the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee, created by the British government to give advice on a newly emergent agricultural plague, "mad cow" disease.
He instantly offended senior bureaucrats by writing the chief medical officer that the committee lacked any experts. "He attacked what he called `the English amateur tradition,' " said Pennington, "in which one establishes a committee to solve a problem and qualification for membership is that nobody knows anything about the subject."
Dr. Brown kept firing off cutting missives until experts were consulted. Years later, his criticisms would be seen by the government inquiry into the handling of mad cow as important early whistle-blowing, and Dr. Brown would be decorated by the queen for service on the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee. At the time, however, the consensus was that Dr. Brown was better suited to the lab than Whitehall.
The same year, Breeze, then the director of Plum Island Animal Disease Center, America's high security lab for foot-and-mouth research, recruited Dr. Brown to the United States.
Dr. Brown left the lab in January of this year because his wife, Audrey, was showing the first signs of Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Brown did not live to learn that in the last week of February, the USDA finally licensed a swine version of the diagnostic test Dr. Brown developed at Plum Island.
He leaves his wife and two sons, Roger and David.
