Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer, a 67-year-old retired Navy flier, is the head of the strikingly successful President’s Malaria Initiative.
Many malaria fighters call him one of the most quietly effective leaders in public health because he has been quietly fighting the disease, cutting yearly malaria deaths to about 600,000 from one million. Thanks to him, worldwide malaria deaths have dropped 40 percent, to about 600,000 a year from one million.
Because of the effectiveness proven, his tactics now are applied and used popularly by many countries in the world. They are prevention tactic including free distribution of nets impregnated with insecticide, indoor pesticide spraying and routine doses of malaria medicine for pregnant women and diagnosis and treatment tactic with rapid blood tests and pills that combine a new fast-acting Chinese drug, artemisinin with one of several longer-lasting drugs. In addition, Admiral Ziemer was also touring rural Myanmar because the region is the cradle of drug-resistant malaria and his agency is fighting it by subsidizing two-drug pills.
A Resilient Leader
Admiral Ziemer was a self-effacing penny-pinching approach person who was willing to fly coach everywhere, even when executives of other relief organizations traveling with him buy business-class tickets.
Besides, after Mr. Obama was elected; Admiral Ziemer drafted a resignation letter but it was declined. Then he prepared it again after the transition team for Hillary Rodham Clinton, the new secretary of state, ousted his counterpart overseeing AIDS, Dr. Mark R. Dybul. But he was asked to stay.
Moreover, he is extremely self-deprecating and amicable when paying official calls on the health minister and two national laboratories and flying as well as driving for hours to chat with village chiefs, local malaria educators, rural doctors and pharmacists, rubber tappers and road builders instead of meeting in luxurious hotels.
Motivated to Serve
From infancy through high school, Admiral Ziemer lived in Ban Me Thuot, in the central highlands of French Indochina, in what is now Vietnam. He spoke Rade, the local mountain tribe’s dialect, ate coconut “lakewater Popsicles,” chased French convoys begging the soldiers to throw chocolate and played in tunnels dug by the Japanese during World War II.
Later, when the French pulled out, a small American military base was built nearby. At school, he was just a natural leader who he taught classmates to walk on stilts and organized jump-rope sessions for 100. Because he was good-looking, athletic, smart and kind, many girls fell in love with him but he finally married Jodi Evans, the daughter of missionaries working in Pleiku, a nearby town.
In 1964, he left for Wheaton, a religious college near Chicago. Four years later, during the Tet offensive, North Vietnamese and Vietcong soldiers overran Ban Me Thuot. Local families fled to the mission clinic, which then came under attack. His father was killed while trying to negotiate evacuation of the wounded. Only his mother survived — bleeding from 18 wounds. When the North Vietnamese retreated during a counterattack, they left her in a ditch. A local man rescued her and contacted the Americans. She was evacuated to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, in a plane full of wounded G.I.s.
When her 21-year-old son climbed aboard, she handed him verses she had copied from a hymn about counting one’s blessings, and naming hers — her years with her husband, her three children, her life serving the Vietnamese, her medical care and knowing Jesus.
In his senior year, facing the draft, he joined the Navy and asked to return to Vietnam. Appointed in 2006 to be the President's Malaria Initiative, Admiral Ziemer drafted a resignation letter after President Obama's election; but it was declined.
He became a helicopter pilot and flew 550 missions with the Sea Wolves, a unit based in the Mekong Delta, extracting Navy SEALs from missions and protecting the river patrol boats like those that Secretary of State John Kerry served on.
However, he was not avenging his father, he insisted in an interview that vengeance was the Lord’s and you defer to that. Being a missionary’s son gave him a need to serve, he said. Also, he saw the fight as a civil war in which the South Vietnamese, among whom he had grown up, needed help against the North.
After Vietnam, he spent years as a squadron leader, hunting Soviet submarines and teaching, before being promoted into the Pentagon. After retirement, he headed World Relief.
A Different Approach
The malaria initiative was founded in 2005, now supports efforts by 25 countries in Africa and Southeast Asia. Admiral Ziemer expressed that his motivation was to keep the malaria fighting moving, therefore, he keeps traveling to many places to save the world!
Summarized by Chi Bui
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/21/science/a-quiet-approach-to-bringing-down-malaria.html?_r=0
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