Raoult Ratard, Louisiana’s state epidemiologist, dies

Raoult Ratard, Louisiana’s state epidemiologist has died at the age of 75.

Ratard died Monday, state Department of Health spokesman Kevin Litten said in an email Tuesday. The state did not disclose the cause of death, but Litten said it was not brought about by the new coronavirus. Ratard was fighting Louisiana’s outbreak as the state epidemiologist.

“Dr. Ratard was an exceptional public health professional and was a mentor to many within the Department of Health,” Litten wrote. “He was not leading on the state’s response to COVID-19. The Department of Health will continue the work that has been well underway for months.”

Records show Ratard spent

48 years working in and teaching public health, starting in his native Vanuato — a South Pacific archipelago then called New Hebrides, in 1972. He was appointed state epidemiologist in 2000 and worked a total of 26 years at Louisiana’s Office of Public Health.

Ratard “guided our state through public health responses to West Nile virus,

H1N1, Ebola preparation” and other issues, Gov. John Bel Edwards said in a news release Tuesday.

Ratard was born in Santo, New Hebrides, and “spent his youth under the coconut trees before having to go to College in grey and cold Paris, France,” he wrote in his biography at the Academia.edu website.

He received his medical degree from the University of Paris Medical School in 1968, winning two prizes, and received five specialization diplomas between then and

1970.

In 1976, while working for New Hebrides’ Rural Health Services, Ratard received a master’s degree in science from Louisiana State University and a master’s in public health and tropical medicine from Tulane University,

according to his resume.

He completed his preventive medicine residency in

Texas, where he worked as a Hansen’s disease consultant for the Texas Department of Public Health. His first stint at Louisiana’s health department began in 1980. Five years later, he left to supervise a Tulane team studying schistosomiasis, a disease caused by parasitic flatworms, in the Republic of Cameroon in central Africa.