Tore Godal / Illustration by Jordan Domont
Inspiring Lives: Tore Godal
Norway’s Leprosy DoctorTwenty years ago, immunologist Tore Godal stood before the faculty of Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia and held up a vial of his own urine. It was as dark as stout beer—and Godal realized that it could only mean one thing: he had contracted hepatitis on his last trip to Burkina Faso. “If I faint during my talk,” he told the audience, “you shouldn’t be surprised.”
Godal recovered after six months of bed rest but has never been able to steer clear of Africa and its infectious diseases. After a long career at the World Health Organization and non-profit foundations, the 71-year-old scientist currently serves as a special adviser to Norway’s Prime Minister, and continues to hop from country to country drumming up support to untangle the health problems at the root of poverty. Despite his laboratory background, he has embraced low-tech solutions, such as insect nets for fighting malaria, and has partnered with private companies, securing, for instance, free drugs in the treatment of river blindness. Equally important, Godal, working with Gro Harlem Brundtland, the former Norwegian Prime Minister and the WHO’s Director-General in the late 1990s, was able to get through to higher levels on the political food chain. “This combination contributed to raising global health on the political agenda, in a way never seen before,” Brundtland says.
Godal always had grand dreams. Growing up in the rugged, snow-covered Telemark of southeastern Norway, he was fascinated by tales of Nazi resistance fighters—The Heroes of the Telemark—who bombed a German heavy water production plant that would have been used for a nuclear bomb. “These stories stimulated my imagination and my desire for adventure,” Godal says. That adventure, he always believed, would be in one of the alpine valleys of his youth. But when he had completed medical school and his Ph.D. studies on an autoimmune disorder of the thyroid, a professor told him he was establishing a laboratory for leprosy research in Ethiopia, the Armauer Hansen Research Institute, and hoped he would be the director. “I figured it would be a good opportunity to go to Africa before I ended up in that valley in Norway.”
In 1970, he arrived in Addis Ababa for the first time and was excited by the bright colors of the tropics but confronted, at the same time, with devastating poverty. He discovered that the horrendous skin lesions and nerve damage of leprosy were caused not by the infection, but by the body’s inflammation response. The findings explained why the anti-inflammatory cortisone was so useful in treating the disease. Godal realized he had found his calling. “It would have been very frustrating to come home from that and live in Norway having accumulated all this insight into leprosy,” he says. Instead, he took a one-year position at the WHO, organizing a clinical trial for a drug combination that has now become the standard therapy for leprosy.
Godal would eventually take a permanent position with the WHO in 1986, where he first learned the power of low-tech interventions in global health. A researcher named Brian Greenwood had conducted a small study that seemed to suggest that mosquito nets were more effective than anti-malarial drugs at reducing disease. In 1994, Godal organized a massive clinical trial in Gambia, Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Kenya to test how well insecticide-impregnated mosquito nets worked. “He was probably the first person in a position to take things forward to see the potential of this approach in widespread control of malaria,” Greenwood says. When the results came in, the WHO changed its strategy virtually overnight, and, today, mosquito nets are still considered one of the most successful and cost-effective malaria interventions.
What many associate Godal with today is his leadership of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), starting with its founding in 2000. With $750 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—“Bill Gates said later that his hand was shaking when he signed the check,” Godal says—his five-person team supported vaccination projects for hepatitis and Haemophilus influenzae, which causes severe respiratory infections in children.
Godal left GAVI in 2004 and today his work with the Norwegian government focuses on maternal and neonatal health in developing countries. He has advocated training midwives in developing countries, providing clean tools for delivery, and supplies of the hormone oxytocin to speed delivery as well as drugs to stop bleeding. Once again, he is a proponent of practical solutions, such as paying women $25 to give birth in a clinic, rather than their homes, a practice which the Indian government now supports.
This year, Godal beams, maternal health will be a major topic at high-profile meetings, including a special session at the United Nations and the G8/G20 Summit in Canada. With an audience of policymakers, one can only hope that the globetrotting immunologist leaves his vials back in the lab.
Photo: Tore Godal / Illustration by Jordan Domont
