Sir David Nabarro obituary: energetic global health expert

Nabarro spent much of his career co-ordinating efforts to tackle international health crises, including outbreaks of malaria, ebola, cholera, avian flu and, more recently, the Covid-19 pandemic. Between these he co-ordinated global food security for the UN. “I’m actually a doer who delivers. And a doer who is not scared of being accountable at all times,” he told The Guardian in 2017, when he was being considered to succeed Margaret Chan as leader of the World Health Organisation (WHO); ultimately, the post went to Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a British-trained Ethiopian doctor.

In 2006 at a World Bank conference in Singapore. He worked on cholera outbreaks in Haiti and the response to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami

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While Nabarro’s CV might read like that of an international functionary, he was no grey bureaucrat. “He is a study in packaged energy, ready to roll up his sleeves, get involved and sort things out,” The Lancet noted in 2006. “He usually has at least two conversations on the go and is able to focus equally well on a third.” Although more fireman than diplomat, he found diplomacy to be the most effective method. “The best work we do is behind the scenes … Leading from behind is absolutely the very best way,” he said.

His organised mind, results-orientated approach and willingness to take personal risks meant he was the “go-to guy” for UN responses to “really tricky situations”, as he put it. When ebola overwhelmed the health systems of at least three west African nations in 2014 and the UN was accused of being slow to respond, Nabarro leapt into action, galvanising governments and raising an estimated $3.4 billion to tackle the virus and rebuild the affected countries’ economies.

He was tapped again to co-ordinate a deadly cholera outbreak in Haiti in 2016. “I have no illusions about this. It’s going to be tough. But I am not scared by it,” he told the Miami Herald when starting his mission. Adults were vaccinated, rapid-response teams dispatched to new outbreaks and infrastructure improved in places where cholera was rooted — all this despite the UN being considered largely responsible for a previous cholera outbreak, during relief efforts after the devastating earthquake of January 2010. “There is a collective sense that this happened as a result of us trying to help a country, and it’s really unfortunate. But we have to do something about it,” he insisted.

No sooner was cholera under control in Haiti than the world faced the first truly global pandemic of modern times: Covid-19. By early 2020, with little known about the disease, how it spreads and what the best protection might be, as well as no vaccine, Nabarro was urging people not to take a “casual” approach. “We need to be aggressive. Being strong from the start truly does matter. Action now will determine how it will evolve in Britain in coming weeks,” he told the Evening Standard in March 2020. Weeks later he was championing the use of facemasks in public. “We must adapt and learn to live with the new reality of life with Covid-19,” he told Today on Radio 4, while accepting that the worldwide shortage of masks meant prioritising health workers, those with symptoms and the vulnerable.

In December 2021, tens of thousands of new cases were being diagnosed each day, politicians were floundering, and communities were growing restless. Yet he continued to plead for patience, insisting he was no killjoy. “I’ve spent 45 years doing this kind of work and my whole [aim] is to do everything possible to enable life to go on, to enable fun to go on, to enable love to go on,” he told Sky News, urging people, especially government ministers, to take the restrictions seriously. “I’m not speaking with any political message, I’m not speaking with any ideological message. I’m just speaking as a public health doctor who is looking at the signs, listening to the experts, and I think we have a pretty serious problem,” he said.

David Nunes Nabarro was born in London in 1949, the eldest of four children of Sir John Nabarro, a leading light in the world of diabetes research and treatment, and his wife Joan (née Cockrell). One of his uncles was Sir Gerald Nabarro, a Conservative MP in Worcestershire for all but two years between 1950 and 1973.

Nabarro was an expert at raising funds from governments to tackle international crises, like avian influenenza

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He was educated at Oundle School and spent a year as a community service volunteer, organising 400 young people in York working with children, decorating the homes of older people and assisting in a mental health hospital. The programme was featured in an episode of The Younger Generation, a 1967 BBC1 documentary about teenagers.

From the University of Oxford he went to the University of London, qualifying as a physician in 1973. By the mid-1970s he was working largely overseas, including for Save the Children with Kurds in northern Iraq and as district child health officer in the isolated Dhankuta district of Nepal. There he learnt firsthand how closely people in rural areas live with their animals and how vital those animals are to the survival of those whose homes they share. “I’ve seen birds and their importance as a form of short-term household income,” he told The Lancet. He went on to be regional manager for the Save the Children Fund in south Asia.

He was also drawn into international efforts to tackle the HIV/Aids epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, especially the need for a change in public behaviour. “It took many years for societies to come to terms with the reality that sex could be associated with death and it was very disturbing. I participated in the late Nineties in many, many events where people just refused to countenance the possibility that a new virus was going to require that sexual behaviour be changed in a wholesale way,” he recalled, when urging behavioural changes during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Between postings Nabarro qualified in public health and worked on human nutrition at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He also lectured at the University of Liverpool, specialising in international community health. From there he entered the British aid bureaucracy, joining the British Overseas Development Administration before moving to the WHO in 1999 as project manager for the Roll Back Malaria campaign.

Soon, he arrived at his natural home, co-ordinating the response to crises. After surviving the Baghdad bombing, he was drafted in to organise the health response to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which left more than two hundred thousand dead, and the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. In 2005, he was seconded to the UN to co-ordinate the response to the avian influenza outbreak. “I’ve worked in research, know the importance of epidemiology,” he told The Lancet of how he relished this new challenge. “And I’ve now been given a job that uses all the skills I’ve got. I’ve certainly been training for this job all my life.”

Meanwhile, Nabarro never took his eye off the wider public health message, describing poor diet and obesity as one of the world’s biggest threats, especially as poorer countries adopt the eating habits of the West. Diseases such as diabetes “are related to what people eat, how people live, to certain aspects of their lifestyles,” he told The Times in 2017, urging “100 per cent attention” to the subject by not only health ministers but also world leaders and finance ministers because poor diet “is going to lead to massive extra health costs”.

In 2018, Nabarro was awarded the World Food Prize for his work on health and hunger issues. That same year, he founded the 4SD Foundation (Skills, Systems and Synergies for Sustainable Development) with his wife, Florence “Flo” Lasbennes, an agronomist working with farmers and biologists around the world. She survives him, as do Tom, Ollie and Polly, the children of his first marriage to Susanna Graham-Jones who worked with him at Save the Children in Nepal, and Josie and Lucas, the children of his second marriage in 2002 to Gillian Holmes.

The Covid-19 pandemic was Nabarro’s last major international challenge, by which time he was also professor of global health at Imperial College London. However, he came away from it warning that politics is overtaking the international response to global health emergencies. “There has been a funny shift between 2015, when I was working on ebola, and 2020 to 21, working on Covid,” he told NPR Radio in the US. “And it’s this: I find that world leaders are just no longer apparently able to work together and deal with this problem through a global response.”

Sir David Nabarro KCMG CBE, international health expert, was born on August 26, 1949. He died of undisclosed causes on July 25, 2025, aged 75