Via The Globe and Mail, Helen Branswell of The Canadian Press writes a moving obituary: Dr. Donald Low, the face of Toronto’s response to SARS, dies at 68. Excerpt:
Low was a global expert in flesh-eating disease – necrotizing fasciitis caused by group A Streptococcus. He was also an early and passionate champion of the need to combat antibiotic resistance by prudent use of the precious drugs.
But it was through the 2003 SARS outbreak that he became a familiar face to Canadians. While he had no formal leadership role on the response team, his capacity to explain through the media to the public what was going on in the fast-moving outbreak made Low the face of Toronto’s SARS response.
At one point he had to go into quarantine, because he’d been in contact with a colleague who came down with SARS. He worked from home and emerged, 14 days later, without developing the disease. He would later marvel that he never caught SARS, given the amount of exposure he had to cases throughout the outbreak.
Putting in long hours over many weeks, he visibly dropped weight during the outbreak, prompting concerned strangers who saw him on TV news reports to write to ask after his health.
While he was always cognizant of the fact that SARS ended 44 lives and permanently altered others, for Low, a microbiologist, being at an epicentre of the outbreak of a new infectious disease was a career highlight.
In an interview in late February about the 10th anniversary of SARS, Low described the outbreak as “the most amazing experience ever.”
