Innovators & Pioneers
Bruce Evatt
Born: 1939
Nationality: American
Occupation: hematologist, medical scientist
Bruce Evatt was born in a small town in Oklahoma in 1939. He received his medical degree from the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine in 1964 and his advanced training in internal medicine and hematology at the John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, MD. As a hematologist interested in problems of blood clotting, Evatt has been especially concerned with the health and welfare of individuals with hemophilia and other bleeding and clotting disorders. He has worked with hemophilia patients since mid-1965, first on the faculty at Johns Hopkins Hospital and from 1976 at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). He has served as a volunteer for Hemophilia of Georgia and on its board until the mid-1980s and as a CDC liaison to the National Hemophilia Foundation and to the World Federation of Hemophilia since the mid-1980s.
His program at the CDC is a national program directed at the prevention of the complications of hemophilia, thrombophilia, bleeding and clotting disorders specifically affecting women, and thalassemia. He believes that with the proper organization of health care resources, proper education, and the involvement of the hemophilia population in the preventive elements of health care, individuals with hemophilia can live normal, productive lives free of major complications.
His major accomplishments include identifying AIDS as a blood-borne disease affecting persons with hemophilia and blood-transfusion recipients, demonstrating that heat-treatment of human clotting factor concentrates inactivates HIV, and identifying a new class of congenital clotting disorders, protein C deficiency. Presently, his major activity includes managing a national program directed at preventing complications of hemophilia and related bleeding and clotting disorders. He is working with the World Federation of Hemophilia to develop modern hemophilia care in developing countries.
Dr. Evatt has received several national and governmental awards for his work in hemophilia and has authored or co-authored over 200 research and review publications on blood coagulation. Currently, he is chief of the Hematologic Diseases Branch at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, and clinical professor of medicine at Emory University School of Medicine.
Source: Dr. Bruce Evatt and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Link: http://www.cdc.gov/
