Dr. Colin McCord, Who Helped Impose a Smoking Ban, Dies at 94

Dr. Colin McCord, a surgeon credited with saving numerous lives by championing a draconian ban on smoking in New York Metropolis and limits on trans fat in processed meals, galvanizing improved well being look after Black males in Harlem, and bettering maternal and baby well being globally, died on March 11 at his house in Oxford, England. He was 94.

His son, Andy, stated the trigger was congestive coronary heart failure.

Dr. McCord, who was often called Coke, educated lay individuals as paraprofessional medical doctors and surgeons in Mozambique and different African nations decimated by the departure of medical personnel; proved the efficacy of oral rehydration to avoid wasting infants stricken with diarrhea in India and Bangladesh; and helped cut back birthrates in Bangladesh by instructing girls to ship recommendation on contraception and reproductive well being. These worldwide initiatives in all probability spared hundreds of thousands of lives.

He additionally exercised a profound impression on public conduct and well being coverage in New York Metropolis.

Dr. McCord efficiently lobbied for a ban on smoking in workplaces, eating places and bars whereas he was an assistant well being commissioner in Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s administration. The ban, which took impact in 2003, was later expanded and replicated in jurisdictions all over the world.

New York had banned smoking in most eating places in 1995, however the metropolis continued to permit smoking in bars and the bar areas of eating places. Because the son of chain people who smoke who each died of most cancers, Dr. McCord described himself as “the heaviest secondhand smoker in New York Metropolis.”

“It’s crucial epidemic of our time,” he stated in 2002, when the ban was expanded to incorporate bars. “Annually the Well being Division indicators loss of life certificates of 10,000 New Yorkers who died due to a tobacco-related trigger; 1,000 of those individuals died due to publicity to secondhand smoke.”

Years earlier, Dr. McCord and a fellow researcher created a sensation once they disclosed in a 1990 article within the authoritative New England Journal of Medication that Black males in Harlem had been much less more likely to dwell to the age of 65 than males in Bangladesh, which was one of many world’s poorest nation’s when it was created in 1971.

The report not solely brought about a stir; it additionally produced outcomes.

Dr. McCord was named director of a federally funded prevention program at Harlem Hospital, a division of the town’s Well being and Hospitals Company. Applications had been initiated, as really helpful by the report, to handle the identified causes of early loss of life from continual illness, together with breast most cancers screenings and neonatal testing. And investments had been made to enhance the supply of well being care in an overwhelmed system.

Dr. McCord and Dr. Harold P. Freeman of Columbia College and Harlem Hospital, with whom he created the report, concluded that their findings had been “not an remoted phenomenon,” and that the racial disparities in life expectancy, significantly for Black males and poor individuals generally, had been mirrored elsewhere within the metropolis and across the nation.

Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, who had been the town’s well being commissioner when Dr. McCord was an assistant commissioner, cited his “readability of pondering, moral dedication and efficient motion,” which he stated saved lives.

“Coke’s work on baby survival made it extra possible that hundreds of thousands of kids would survive,” Dr. Frieden stated in an e-mail. “His work on surgical procedure saved 1000’s of moms and kids. And his catalytic pondering on trans fats helped set off a worldwide motion that may stop hundreds of thousands of deaths from coronary heart assault.”

Dr. McCord was born Colin Wallace Miller on Might 15, 1928, in Chicago to Colin Miller, who grew to become a information company correspondent and film producer, and George Lial Mickelberry, who was often called Sis.

He was all the time known as Coke, a variation of his father’s nickname, Coco.

His dad and mom’ marriage was annulled inside a 12 months, and Coke was raised by his mom, who was a youngster. When he was about 4, his mom married A. King McCord, who grew to become chairman of the Westinghouse Air Brake Firm. Coke was formally adopted by Mr. McCord when he was 16.

He enrolled in a army coaching program at Chicago Harvard Faculty throughout World Battle II, however the conflict ended earlier than the Military might deploy him to the Pacific.

After graduating in 1949 from Williams School in Massachusetts, the place he majored in chemistry, he earned a medical diploma from the Columbia College School of Physicians and Surgeons in 1953. He served his residency in surgical procedure at Bellevue Hospital and in thoracic surgical procedure at Bellevue and Presbyterian Hospitals.

He married Susan Lewis Hobson in 1954; she died in 2002. He moved to England in about 2004.

Along with his son, Dr. McCord is survived by two daughters, Mary McCord and Anne McCord Wrublewski; his second spouse, Susanne Ehrhardt Chowdhury; a stepdaughter, Bristi Chowdhury; a sister, Leslie Danforth; and 4 grandchildren.

After finishing his surgical residency, Dr. McCord taught on the College of Oregon, Portland; directed rural well being applications in India and Bangladesh for the Division of Worldwide Well being at Johns Hopkins College; and served as director of surgical providers at a hospital in Mozambique from 1981 to 1986.

After returning to New York in 1987, he was named affiliate director of surgical procedure at Harlem Hospital, when he collaborated with Dr. Freeman.

The 2 males discovered that whereas a big proportion of the so-called extra deaths amongst Black males in Harlem resulted from violence and drug abuse, many of the extra was attributable to different causes.

“The underside-line downside is poverty,” Dr. Freeman instructed The Occasions in 1990. “People who find themselves intensely poor produce other priorities. Individuals assume current tense. They don’t assume future. They give thought to making it by means of the day. Persons are combating for his or her lives.”