URBANA — When she first got there, there was nothing she could do to save them.

She couldn’t save the babies and children from the deadly measles virus that swept through the rural Tanzanian community where she was the sole physician.

“I saw two to three children suffocate to death every day,” Dr. Susan Nagele said. “I didn’t have oxygen, let alone a ventilator. So we lost a lot of kids because of the lack of resources.”

Nagele knew she would likely see measles cases in Tanzania. What the 1973 Urbana High School alumna didn’t count on was that she’d land smack-dab in the middle of an outbreak.

“The typical patient would have been very malnourished, a child under the age of 5 so skinny — the skin kind of just hanging off the bones,” she said. “Their eyes would be full of pus and swollen shut. Because they were malnourished, their hair would be kind of reddish and very thin, sparsely. Their bellies would be very distended because they usually had worms.”

Nagele was in Tanzania with Maryknoll Lay Missioners, a nonprofit formed in 1911 by the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops.

She had just finished her family-practice residency at Carbondale Memorial Hospital and knew she wanted to practice medicine overseas. The organization needed health care workers in East Africa, and she signed on.

She would end up working in Tanzania, Sudan and Kenya for the next 33 years. She opened hospitals, clinics, tuberculosis treatment centers, primary health care centers, and mobile outreach clinics — treating tens of thousands of patients in dire circumstances.

Her work would end up earning her the American Medical Association Medal of Valor for her “courage in extraordinary circumstances.”

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But the vaccination programs meant the most to the physician who’ll be honored Friday with a Distinguished Alumni Award from the Champaign Urbana Schools Foundation.

“I will say from the start,” she said, “the best thing I did in my career was vaccination.”

‘Just do your best, Susan’

Nagele’s first assignment was to rebuild a health care clinic in Kowak, Tanzania. It was 1985 when she arrived in an East African country that at the time was among the poorest on the planet and remains so 40 years later.

“Many people were very corrupt in the government, and they stole and looted — the country had just all fallen apart. Nothing was functioning,” Nagele said. “You couldn’t buy a kilo of sugar, and you couldn’t buy a liter of petrol.

“That’s part of why the church was trying to get this health clinic back on its feet,” she added. “And part of the reason why there were so many measles cases — they didn’t have programs for vaccinations. We set one up immediately.”

Containing a measles outbreak in that kind of environment was going to be more than Nagele thought she could handle. She had never seen a single case of the highly contagious disease during her medical training.

“At first, I was worried that I wouldn’t be good enough, that I wouldn’t know enough,” she said. “That’s when I quickly realized I was all they had — I was the best that was available. I certainly didn’t have all the answers. I improved over time as I learned things. But I realized, ‘Just do your best, Susan, because there’s nobody else in this situation that can help them.’”

Nagele worked tirelessly to get as many children vaccinated as possible.

“I remember making charts and keeping stats on all the cases,” she said. “After three years, the kids weren’t dying anymore, but we still had measles. It took another three years before we didn’t have any more measles cases coming in.”

In the end, it took six years for Nagele to eradicate measles in the community, which she did while at the same time treating patients for numerous other conditions and diseases.

Nagele remembers being awake for nearly 72 hours during a cholera outbreak in 1987. With no other doctors in the area, she was on her own, with no backup to call in.

If she slept, people would die. She powered through, as she would do time and again over the next three decades.

‘You are just trying to stay alive’

Next stop: Sudan.

When Nagele heard a bishop in Sudan needed help, once again, she answered the call — in a country beset by a civil war when she arrived. This time, she stayed for 12 years.

At one point, she supervised a team in the community of Nanyangachor, working on a plateau so remote it could only be accessed on foot. With coolers on their backs, her team hauled over 1,000 temperature-controlled polio vaccines to the area.

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Advancing military, inaccessible plateaus, disease outbreaks — nothing would deter her from getting vaccines and medical care to those who needed it most.

She credits her Catholic faith and the people around her for helping her get through the hardest times.

“I mean, we’re all in the same boat,” she said. “At this point, when they’re dropping bombs from up there, you know, it doesn’t make any difference what language you speak, how much money you have. You are just trying to stay alive.

“It’s kind of hard to describe really how powerful these relationships and emotions can be in terrible situations. But it was their commitment to one another, living by their values, the whole crux of what it means to be human and why we live and what we want to do now and tomorrow.”

One of Nagele’s proudest moments came on Aug. 25, 2020, when the World Health Organization announced that polio had been eradicated from the continent of Africa. She had been working with South African President Nelson Mandela’s Kick Polio Out of Africa campaign from the very start, in 1996.

‘We lived this already’

Today, the 1978 University of Illinois alumna is back home in Urbana taking care of her elderly mom and 13-year-old dog, Pepper. Nagele retired from Maryknoll Lay Missioners but not from advocating for sound, evidence-based public-health policy.

The world-renowned physician and humanitarian wants our community to learn from her more than three decades of overseeing lifesaving vaccination programs in the impoverished countries of Tanzania, Sudan and Kenya.

Measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000 by the World Health Organization, but one of the most contagious of infectious diseases has re-emerged since, with 483 confirmed U.S. cases already this year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“It’s going to take a long time to get rid of it again,” Nagele said. “It’s really heartbreaking to hear that people are dying from it.”

Measles vaccinations can be given at 15 months in the U.S. That leaves kids under that age at risk for contracting the virus.

In order for the virus not to spread to infants and others who can’t get vaccinated due to medical reasons, 95 percent of the population must be vaccinated, said Nagele, debunking claims by so-called “anti-vaxxers.”

“I’m giving you these facts from reality. We lived this already,” she said of the years she spent helplessly watching babies suffocate from the measles virus. “That is the credibility that I have.

“For the common good, let each one of us who can be vaccinated, get vaccinated.”

Honor roll

Friday at the I Hotel and Conference Center, the Champaign Urbana Schools Foundation will honor five distinguished Unit 4 and District 116 alumni “whose achievements, strength of character and citizenship serve as role models to inspire and challenge today’s youth.” We'll continue to tell their stories between now and then.

— Jennifer Lansford (Centennial '91), Distinguished Alumni Award

— Donna Tanner-Harold (Central '72), Distinguished Alumni Award

— Dr. Susan Nagele (Urbana '73), Distinguished Alumni Award

— Brett Shaw (Centennial '07), Local Business Community Impact Award

— Robert Lewis (Urbana '64), Local Hero Award