Robert Austrian, 90; research led to pneumonia vaccine
WASHINGTON -- Robert Austrian, an academic physician whose pioneering research led to the development of a vaccine to prevent and treat pneumonia, meningitis, and other deadly pneumococcal infections, died last Sunday of a stroke at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He was 90.
"He was a true scientific giant," said Harvey Friedman , chief of infectious diseases at the University of Pennsylvania, where Dr. Austrian taught and conducted research for more than 40 years.
"What Dr. Austrian did to solve a major human disease problem, often totally by himself, is extremely rare in modern medicine," Friedman said.
The first pneumococcal vaccine was introduced in 1945, but doctors tended to rely on penicillin even in cases where the antibiotic was least effective. Dr. Austrian had to fight an uphill battle to rekindle interest in a vaccine.
"He said that treatment is great, but prevention is better," Friedman said.
In a study of 529 patients at Kings County Hospital in New York, Dr. Austrian found that almost a third of pneumonia patients over 50 died, even if they had been treated with penicillin. He maintained that a vaccine would prevent hundreds of thousands of needless deaths throughout the world.
His studies revealed that, despite the availability of antibiotics, there were still almost half as many pneumonia deaths in the United States in the 1960s as there were at the turn of the century. He also established that people over 50 and those with chronic debilitating diseases were the largest group at risk.
Dr. Austrian also had to convince a skeptical medical community that pneumococcal diseases, notoriously difficult to cultivate in the laboratory, were more common than medical researchers realized.
He concluded that of the 83 known types of pneumococci -- now more than 90 -- 14 were responsible for 80 percent of all pneumococcal infections. After conducting clinical trials among military trainees and gold miners in South Africa, he reported in 1976 that his vaccine was safe and effective against the 14 most common lethal strains. The vaccine was licensed in 1977; an improved version, effective against 23 types, became available in 1983.
Dr. Austrian was born in Baltimore, the son of Charles Robert Austrian, a Johns Hopkins University internist who specialized in chest diseases, and Florence Hochschild Austrian, an artist. He received a bachelor's degree in 1937 and a medical degree in 1941, both from Johns Hopkins, and developed an interest in pneumococcal infections while an intern and resident at Johns Hopkins University Hospital.
During World War II, he worked with a Johns Hopkins medical team in the Fiji Islands, where he treated casualties from the South Pacific, and also did research on the use of Atrabine to treat malaria. 