The WHO Department of Control of Neglected Tropical diseases is deeply saddened at the loss of Dr Joseph Allen Cook, who died of acute myeloid leukemia in Pittsboro, North Carolina, on 1 October 2022, aged 87 years. A specialist in tropical infectious diseases, he had been the founding Director of the International Trachoma Initiative (ITI) (www.trachoma.org).
Joe Cook was born on 26 November 1934, in Chickasha, Oklahoma. He attended public schools there, then joined the University of Oklahoma under a Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps scholarship. After four years in the Navy, he attended Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, where he was president of his graduating class. Dr Cook trained in internal medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and in tropical infectious diseases at the Harvard School of Public Health. He then joined the field staff of the Rockefeller Foundation. Dr Cook was placed in charge of clinical and field studies in Saint Lucia, studying the use of chemotherapy to control schistosomiasis. The findings of this project influenced current programmes for control and elimination of schistosomiasis worldwide, emphasizing widespread treatment in order to rapidly reduce prevalence and morbidity. In 1978, Dr Cook joined the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, where he served for more than 20 years as Director of Tropical Disease Research, fostering groundbreaking work on trachoma, among many other things. The ITI was an outgrowth of the foundation’s research support; Dr Cook built it into a key part of today’s global efforts to eliminate trachoma, through his support of the science, his advocacy for trachoma elimination and his work with Pfizer Inc. to co-found the ITI. A former President of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, Dr Cook received the Mackay Medal for outstanding work in public health in 2001. He served on numerous advisory committees in the United States of America and for the World Health Organization. In 2002, the French International Agency against Trachoma awarded Dr Cook its Grande Medaille d’Or.
Throughout his career he remained humble, compassionate, intellectually curious and hard-working. He was an excellent listener and an unfailing source of good advice. Joe backed numerous young (and often, in their own later admission, hitherto untested) investigators, laying an early platform for stellar academic growth, success and discovery. Universally loved and admired throughout his life, alongside many hundreds of friends, Joe Cook is survived by his wife of 58 years, Elizabeth “Betty Anne” Curtis Cook, three daughters and sons-in-law – Catherine and Saul Zambrano, Caroline and Richard Alter, and Marianne and Robert Ratcliffe – and eight grandchildren.