Paul Offit
Paul A. Offit (born March 27, 1951 in Baltimore , Maryland ) is an American medical doctor ( pediatrics ) and vaccine developer.
Offit graduated from Tufts University with a bachelor's degree in medicine and a PhD (MD) from the University of Maryland . He was also a student at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia of vaccine developer Maurice Hilleman . He is the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccine Science and Professor of Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, where he heads the Infectious Diseases Division. He directs the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and served on the Vaccine Advisory Committee for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Offit developed a vaccine (RotaTeq, approved in the USA in 2006 and produced by Merck & Co. ) against the rotavirus (with H. Fred Clark and Stanley Plotkin ) over decades . The disease is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths from diarrhea in children each year, particularly in the developing world.
He is also known in the US as a public opponent of the promises of alternative medicine and anti-vaccination campaigns in the US who have promoted the scientifically refuted view that vaccinations are linked to autism (he published a book on this in 2008). In 2005 he became a member of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry .
He is co-editor of a standard work on vaccines.
In 2013 he received the Maxwell Finland Award and in 2015 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .
Fonts
- Edited with Walter A. Orenstein, Stanley Plotkin: Vaccines, 6th edition, Elsevier Saunders 2013
- Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong. National Geographic, 2017
- Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine. Basic Books, 2015
- Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine. Harper. 2013 (in Great Britain: Killing Us Softly: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine)
- Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All. Basic Books. 2011
- Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure, Columbia University Press. 2008
- Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases. Smithsonian Books / Collins. 2007 (biography of Maurice Hilleman )
- The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis. Yale University Press. 2005
- with Gary S. Marshall, Penelope H. Dennehy, David P. Greenberg, Tina Q. Tan: The Vaccine Handbook: A Practical Guide for Clinicians. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. 2003
- with Louis M. Bell: Vaccines: What Every Parent Should Know. Macmillan. 1999
- 3rd edition as: Vaccines: What You Should Know, Wiley 2003
- with Bonnie Fass-Offit, Louis M. Bell: Breaking the Antibiotic Habit: A Parent's Guide to Coughs, Colds, Ear Infections, and Sore Throats. John Wiley. 1999
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Offit, Paul |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Offit, Paul A. |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American medic |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 27, 1951 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Baltimore , Maryland |