Karel Styblo

Karel Styblo (26 November 1921, Vilémov – 13 March 1998, The Hague) was a Czech-Dutch physician. Internationally recognized for his work with tuberculosis (TB), and the "father of modern TB control". Toward the end of World War II, he was imprisoned at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Austria, where he contracted tuberculosis. After his recovery and release, Styblo entered Charles University in Prague. Obituaries say Styblo studied under Sir John Crofton at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland in the 1950s; Crofton said in an interview that they met in 1960 while Styblo was still in Czechoslovakia. and became a Dutch citizen in 1971. Called Directly Observed Therapy – Short Course (DOTS), the TB therapy revolutionized the fight to control TB throughout the world. He was also responsible for instituting a systematic feedback method for analyzing outcomes of TB cases, known as the "cohort review" principle (CR), which was adopted in London and outside of the UK.

Legacy In a historical review of tuberculosis, Murray (2004) writes:In the mid-1970s, a redoubtable Czech, Karel Styblo, harnessed the meager resources of the International Union against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease and showed that, contrary to expert opinion, tuberculosis could be controlled in extremely poor countries: beginning in Tanzania, one of the poorest of them all.

Of Styblo, Crofton said:He was a quiet man, but wonderfully persistent and an enormous worker. Several east African countries had asked for help with tuberculosis and Styblo was sent there. He proved to have a genius for persuading governments that tuberculosis was a major economic problem as well as a public health concern. He was also able to convince them that they could handle diagnosis and treatment through their routine health services, without special tuberculosis clinics and services. Above all he stressed the importance of monitoring patients throughout the course of treatment, as he had seen done in Edinburgh.

Tom Frieden, former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, credits feedback from Styblo for leading Frieden to initiate programs that led to a marked reduction in tuberculosis in New York City. In addressing graduates at the Harvard School of Public Health in 2014, Frieden said that Styblo's query about how many patients the New York City program had cured shamed him into "implementing a program to track the outcomes of every single patient diagnosed", adding that the question "changed my life." Frieden said that Styblo's "way of treating tuberculosis has saved millions of lives around the world". The International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Diseases (IUATLD) instituted the Karel Styblo Public Health Prize after his death, to recognize a "health worker (physician or lay-person) or a community organisation for contributions to tuberculosis control or lung health over a period of 10 years or more".