By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
Dr. Robert Austrian, who developed a pneumococcal vaccine that has saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, died Sunday in Philadelphia. He was 90.
The cause was a stroke, said Dr. Harvey M. Friedman, chief of infectious diseases at the University of Pennsylvania, where Dr. Austrian had taught and done research to prevent and treat infectious diseases for the last 40 years.
Dr. Austrian did much of the early research that led to the pneumococcal vaccine in New York City, working at Bellevue Hospital and then with Dr. Colin Macleod at the Rockefeller Institute. Later, he continued the research at Kings County Hospital and the State University of New York College of Medicine, both in Brooklyn. The college is now known as SUNY Downstate.
The vaccine can prevent the pneumonia, meningitis and blood system and other infections caused by the bacterium Streptococcus pneumoniae. These infections were long a major cause of illness and death among the elderly and the chronically ill throughout the world. Even healthy adults and infants suddenly died from them.
After the introduction of penicillin and other antibiotics after World War II, most doctors assumed that pneumococcal infections would no longer be a major cause of death, and they stopped prescribing a pneumococcal vaccine used at the time.
Dr. Austrian was unconvinced by the prevailing medical wisdom. Through his work as a clinician, epidemiologist and microbiologist, he showed that pneumococcal pneumonia remained a killer. Two vaccines based on Dr. Austrian’s work were licensed in 1977 and 1983.
