Professor Emeritus Honored for Public Health Career Spanning Nearly 70 Years

James H. Steele, D.V.M., professor emeritus at The University of Texas School of Public Health, is the 2006 winner of the Abraham Horowitz Award for Leadership in Inter-American Health.

James H. Steele, D.V.M.

The prestigious award from the Pan American Health and Education Foundation recognizes Steele’s contributions to veterinary public health, specifically “zoonotic” diseases that transfer from animals to humans.

“We recognize Dr. Steele as a pioneer in integrating veterinary health into public health agencies such as the Pan American Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control,” said Frederick Naftolin, M.D., board trustee of the foundation. “Among the many and varied contributions Dr. Steele has made during his professional career, perhaps one of the most significant is in the area of the control of foodborne diseases.”

In particular, Steele has been an advocate of food irradiation, which he believes would prevent E-coli outbreaks such as the recent one involving fresh spinach.

Steele, 93, received a doctorate of veterinary medicine from Michigan State University in 1941 and a master of public health degree from Harvard University in 1942. While working in a brucellosis testing laboratory for the Michigan State Department of Agriculture from 1938-41, he became interested in zoonotic diseases.

“I heard all of these people arguing about whether brucellosis was food-borne, water-borne or airborne, and I thought being a disease investigator would be an exciting field,” Steele said.

In 1946, he began traveling in the Americas to investigate outbreaks of equine encephalitis, foot and mouth disease, tuberculosis, brucellosis and rabies. His model of a response to a rabies outbreak in the late ‘40s is still used worldwide.

He founded the first veterinarian public health program at the U.S. Public Health Service, where he served for 26 years. In 1968 he was named assistant surgeon general for veterinary affairs.

Steele joined the UT School of Public Health’s Infectious Disease Center in 1971. He now is the namesake of the school’s James H. Steele Lecture series, which was established to recognize his contributions and leadership in the fields of infectious disease and zoonotic diseases.

A James H. Steele Professorship in Public Health – currently held by Joseph B. McCormick, M.D., dean of the Brownsville Regional Campus – was endowed in Steele’s honor in 1996.

“I’ve lived long enough to see zoonotic diseases widely accepted throughout the United States and the world, and long enough to see the World Health Organization adopt things that I believe in,” Steele said.

While he has been exposed to many diseases, including the tuberculosis that plagued his first wife throughout their 20-year marriage, he said the only thing he ever caught was avian influenza.

“In 1959, I came down with something I thought was malaria – but it turned out I became the first victim of avian influenza, the grandfather of all avian influenza viruses, H7N7,” Steele said. “The CDC put me in the hospital, and it took two years for me to come back to normal. Last April at a lecture, I was introduced as a ‘man who seeks strange viruses and brings them back to us.’” Steele received his award at the 47th Pan American Health Organization Directing Council meeting in Washington, D.C.

By Deborah Mann Lake, Institutional Advancement