On March 29, 2003, he crashed and died, after eighteen days of intensive care in a hospital in Bangkok. He was forty-seven years old. Toward the end, he asked for a priest to administer last rites and directed that samples of his lung tissue be saved for scientific analysis. I fervently hope that Carlo Urbani will be remembered as one of the great heroes of modern epidemiology—a man with a noble mission who sacrificed his own life to care for others and alert the world to a vicious and imminent threat.
