Daniel Tarantola

Who is Daniel Tarantola?

Daniel Tarantola was born in Ajaccio, France, in 1942. Having obtained his medical degree from Paris University, Daniel began an international health career in 1971 in the context of emergency humanitarian medical missions to Biafra, and Peru. He was engaged in a movement with Bernard Kouchner which resulted in the foundation of Médecins Sans Frontières, of which he was the first physician working in the field. Early in his career, Daniel worked over almost two decades with the World Health Organization on large scale international health programmes, including the eradication of smallpox from Bangladesh, childhood disease control programmes, the Expanded Programme on Immunization, the Control of Diarrhoeal Diseases Programme, the Acute Respiratory Infections Programme and as a senior member of the team who designed and started the launching of the WHO Global programme on HIV/AIDS.

Having left WHO in 1991, Daniel was over a period of eight years a Lecturer in the Department of Population and International Health of the Harvard School of Public Health and a Senior Associate of the Harvard-based François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights.