Lives Lost: Doctor who battled disease outbreaks in Yemen

For five decades, Yassin Abdel-Wareth was one of a handful of epidemiologists in Yemen, traveling across the impoverished country to hunt for disease outbreaks that are as endemic as armed conflicts in the Middle East’s poorest nation.

He had seen cholera, malaria, Rift Valley fever and, in early June, he was worried about the new coronavirus.

Abdel-Wareth told his brother: “The virus is in every house in Yemen.”

Weeks later, the 72-year-old doctor-turned-epidemiologist was dead from COVID-19. His family said he may have contracted the virus while inspecting a quarantine facility set up outside the capital, Sanaa, by Houthi rebels, who have been concealing the virus's toll in Yemen.

“We will need 100 years to have someone like Dr. Yassin,” colleague Abdel-Salam al-Aqel said.

Abdel-Wareth's family and colleagues remember a generous, kind-hearted man who protected them from Yemen's ultraconservative society and a tireless doctor with an encyclopedic memory who navigated the country's tribal and regional fault lines to educate Yemenis about disease prevention. ___

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part of an ongoing series of stories remembering people who have died from the coronavirus around the world. ___

Hailing from a poor family, Abdel-Wareth was the eldest of seven siblings from the western province of Taiz, the birthplace of many of Yemen’s intellectuals and businessmen. He left a short stint as an air traffic controller to study medicine in the then-Soviet Union.

Years later, he returned to work at rural hospitals, where he was the only health worker, doing everything from treating malnutrition to handling surgeries. He took up epidemiology because he wanted to prevent the diseases that drove scores of patients to his hospital.

“If an outbreak takes place...