and became a naturalized American citizen.ĭescribed by James LeDuc, a former colleague, as “kind of the secret weapon for a lot of what was done at C.D.C. But since autopsies were not permitted in Egypt for religious reasons, he did his residency in anatomic pathology at Emory University in Atlanta, where he also received a doctorate in experimental pathology. Zaki earned a master’s in pathology from Alexandria University. “We go into the basics of how a disease happens, the mechanism,” he said in an interview with Stat, a medical website, in 2016. That obsession was at the heart of his work at the C.D.C. But he was less interested in practicing medicine than in unraveling mysteries, which had been an obsession of his ever since he was captivated by the novels of the British author Enid Blyton as a child. Zaki graduated second in his class of 800 from the Alexandria Medical School in Egypt in 1978. In addition to his wife - Nadia Abougad when they married - he is survived by a daughter, Yasmin a son, Samy and two sisters, Dorreya and Safa.ĭr. They learned from follow-up interviews that dead bats had been discovered in the boy’s home, and that he had found a live bat in his bedroom. Zaki’s team detected rabies virus in the boy’s body. After the boy was hospitalized, tests were inconclusive, but he died two weeks later.Ībout a week after that, Dr. In 2005, a few days after complaining to his pediatrician of a fever, a headache and an itchy scalp, a 10-year-old Mississippi boy became so agitated that he bit a relative. It turned out that the organ donor’s daughter had a pet hamster. Zaki and his colleagues pinpointed the cause as lymphocytic choriomeningitis, a rare rodent-borne virus. Zaki’s “remarkable patience, perseverance and curiosity,” as well as his “stubborn determination to find the cause of disease, whether it involved one patient or 100 patients - he simply would not give up.”Īfter four people who received organ transplants in Massachusetts and Rhode Island developed a viral infection and three of them died, Dr. Zaki headed the agency’s Unexplained Deaths Project, a squad of detectives of last resort responsible for delving into the causes of the 700 or so baffling fatalities from disease that occur in the United States every year.Ī colleague, Dr.
He and his team helped identify a deadly outbreak of hantavirus in the Navajo Nation in 1993 (that discovery spurred the expansion of the infectious diseases pathology branch) a previously unidentified bacterial illness called leptospirosis in Nicaragua and the mosquito-borne Zika virus in the brain tissue of babies in Brazil, establishing that it could be transmitted during pregnancy.ĭr.
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