World-renowned HIV specialist Dr. Frank Plummer of Winnipeg is dead at 67. He was visiting Kenya, where he was a keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the University of Nairobi’s collaborative centre for research and training in HIV/AIDS/STIs.
World-renowned scientist Dr. Frank Plummer of Winnipeg has died.
Plummer, 67, was in Kenya, where he was a keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the University of Nairobi’s collaborative centre for research and training in HIV/AIDS/STIs.
Dr. Larry Gelmon, who helped set up that meeting, said Plummer collapsed and was taken to hospital in Nairobi, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.
No confirmed cause of death has yet been released.
Plummer was born and raised in Winnipeg, where he headed up Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory for several years.
He was also involved in an innovative research partnership between the University of Manitoba and the University of Nairobi, established before the world was very aware of HIV/AIDS.
“He helped to identify a lot of the key factors that are involved in HIV transmission in the early days,” said Keith Fowke, a professor in the medical microbiology and infectious diseases department at the University of Manitoba.
Before that partnership, scientists didn’t know HIV could be passed on to women or to babies through breast milk.
“He developed a lot of interventions that helped save hundreds of thousands of lives a