The Eradicator: Donald Hopkins

August 2013 — Donald Hopkins, MPH ’70, and currently a vice president at the Carter Center, has spent a career helping to eradicate two major tropical diseases. Beginning in the 1960s he helped lead efforts to vaccinate people in Africa and Asia against smallpox, a disease that was declared eradicated in 1980. In the 1980s, he started the Guinea Worm Disease Eradication Program at the Centers for Disease Control and in 1987 joined the Carter Center. Hopkins has spent the last three decades working to eradicate Guinea worm disease, which in 1986 affected some 3.5 million people. At the beginning of 2013, there were fewer than 600 cases left in the world.