Muireann Brennan obituary: Epidemiologist who led emergency responses in world’s most difficult places

Born: November 21st, 1959

Died: November 5th, 2022

Dr Muireann Brennan, the Dublin-born doctor who had a long career in public health medicine in the developing world, has died suddenly at her home in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr Brennan worked for the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) throughout the world, supporting emergency responses in Pakistan, Syria, Afghanistan, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She also worked on a secondment from the CDC as an epidemiologist with Unicef in Switzerland, where she helped to co-ordinate staff in complex humanitarian emergencies.

Dr Brennan said that the desire to work in overseas emergency and humanitarian medicine was sparked by her experience in northern Kenya as a third-year student at the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland (RCSI). At the time, she was studying tropical medicine and travelled to work with Dr Tim O’Dempsey in a mission hospital in Pokot as part of the overseas elective scheme at the RCSI. A later stint working as the only doctor in a Catholic Mission hospital in Turkana, Kenya, confirmed her interest in overseas work.

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Muireann Brennan grew up in Donnybrook, the eldest of eight children to Louis and Dimphne Brennan. Her father was an architect and her mother, who was the business manager for Louis J Brennan Architecture, was also very involved in voluntary community work with organisations such as Aware and the Bone Marrow for Leukemia fund.

Her work for the CDC brought her all over the world, from checking the emergency response to flooding and cholera outbreaks in Pakistan to supporting humanitarian responses in northern Syria

Muireann attended St Anne’s Secondary School in Milltown, after which she studied medicine at the RCSI. She graduated in 1985. She then completed a doctorate in medicine at Trinity College Dublin and worked abroad as a doctor for a few years. Thereafter she moved to the United States to complete a Masters in public health at Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, one of the world’s oldest academic institutions for public health medicine.

Dr Brennan joined the CDC in 1996, first as an epidemic intelligence service officer and later as a medical epidemiologist in the emergency response and recovery branch in the CDC’s division of global health protection.

Her work for the CDC brought her all over the world, from checking the emergency response to flooding and cholera outbreaks in Pakistan to supporting humanitarian responses in northern Syria and co-ordinating vaccination campaigns in Afghanistan. She was also involved in improving health provision in refugee camps in Ethiopia, Syria and Sierra Leone and recording human rights violations in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Her colleague at the CDC, Richard Garfield, said: “When there was a tough place to be and a difficult job to do, we’d send Muireann. She was a physically small Irish woman who was tough, brave and presented herself unambiguously. Irish people in this work are seen as neutral but engaged and demanding respect, and she was like that.”

Speaking about her experiences in war-torn countries, Dr Brennan said in an interview that Somalia was one of the toughest countries to work in terms of negotiating better healthcare provision. “Warlords were commonplace and the negotiating process in implementing the polio vaccination programme was complex… Once a [vaccination] cycle is completed, you have to leave enough tools for the local doctors to be able to complete the next vaccination cycles themselves – using mobile phones and GPS navigation, they were able to manoeuvre around the militia to reach every district,” she explained.

In 2016, Dr Brennan took on the role of epidemiologist and medical officer at the Unicef Office of Emergency Programmes in Geneva, where she lived for about three years. This job involved communications between the United Nations, the World Health Organisation and Unicef to mobilise the best response in emergencies.

‘She would physically put her life on the line for people she cared about. And, as the eldest in her family, she was always looking out for her younger siblings’

Although leading a truly international life, Dr Brennan kept in close contact with family and returned to Ireland regularly. Family members recall her great sense of humour and her sense of adventure: she would bring her nieces and nephews to see the latest disaster movies and dystopian dramas and on ice-skating expeditions when back in Ireland at Christmas time.

Her lifelong friend, Dr Mairead McGovern, said she was a pioneering spirit who spent her life challenging injustices. “She would physically put her life on the line for people she cared about. And, as the eldest in her family, she was always looking out for her younger siblings,” said Dr McGovern.

Her sister, Bríd Brennan, said that as a young person Muireann loved climbing mountains and picking fraochan (wild bilberries) in the summer months. The area of Atlanta where she lived was surrounded by parks, woodland and wildlife.

An avid reader, her shelves were filled with books on philosophy and religion. As an adult, she joined the Quakers having discovered that their non-hierarchical and reflective approach to religion resonated with her. Latterly, she had a very close relationship with the Quaker community in Atlanta and also attended meetings in Dublin when back in Ireland.

Dr Brennan was due to retire at the end of January 2023 and had already made plans to return to live in Ireland at the time of her death. Following a Quaker funeral in Dublin, she was buried in the Friends Burial Ground in Temple Hill, Blackrock, Co. Dublin.

Dr Brennan is survived by her mother, Dimphne, her siblings, Seumas, Seosamh, Bríd, Lughaidh, Ailbhe and Dimphne, her cousin Dan and extended family. She was predeceased by her father, Louis, and her sister, Ita.