Pyotr Lerner

Pyotr Mikhailovich Lerner was born on 23 February 1922 in Shepetivka (now in the Khmelnytskyi Region of Ukraine). After finishing school in Samarkand he entered the Samarkand State Medical Institute and graduated in 1944.

He began as an epidemiologist and then became chief physician of district and city sanitary-epidemiological stations; from 1946 he also taught at his alma mater. From 1954 to 1960 he was chief epidemiologist of Samarkand Region, which then included the present-day Jizzakh and Navoi regions.

At the institute he rose from assistant to docent and professor. He received the degree of Doctor of Medical Sciences in 1971 and the title of professor in 1972. He was dean of the paediatric faculty from 1970 to 1976, and from 1976 to 1985 vice-rector for research and chairman of the dissertation council. In 1978 he set up the first department of epidemiology at a medical faculty of a medical school in Central Asia and led it until 1994.

Lerner developed a new treatment for hymenolepiasis, approved by the World Health Organization in Geneva in 1975, and a method for diagnosing helminth infections; he was the first to establish how long Giardia and the dwarf tapeworm live in the human body. In Samarkand and Shahrisabz he carried out a long trial of mass bacteriophage prophylaxis and therapy of dysentery. He took part in stamping out outbreaks of cholera, smallpox, typhus, plague, typhoid, polio, diphtheria and other infections in the republic.

He is the author of 196 scientific papers and 16 monographs and took part in 11 international congresses. Since 1995, living in Israel, he has written essays on the history of epidemiology and its figures, memoirs and articles on medical subjects. He holds the titles Honoured Doctor of the Uzbek SSR (1966) and Honoured Scientist of the Uzbek SSR (1980).