Karel Styblo

Tom Frieden, former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, credits feedback from Styblo for leading Frieden to initiate programs that led to a marked reduction in tuberculosis in New York City. In addressing graduates at the Harvard School of Public Health in 2014, Frieden said that Styblo's query about how many patients the New York City program had cured shamed him into "implementing a program to track the outcomes of every single patient diagnosed", adding that the question "changed my life." Frieden said that Styblo's "way of treating tuberculosis has saved millions of lives around the world".

Styblo's life's work was to develop, pioneer, and demonstrate the "proof of principle" for the strategy used to control TB by the World Bank and promulgated by the World Health Organization (WHO). Called Directly Observed Therapy – Short Course (DOTS), the TB therapy revolutionized the fight to control TB throughout the world. DOTS has been employed by 187 of the 193 members of WHO as of 2008. Styblo applied this methodology to the national TB control programs of Tanzania, Benin, Malawi, Mozambique, Nicaragua, and China; DOTS has been described as the "most effective means of controlling the current tuberculosis epidemic" and had been applied in over 90 countries as of 2001.

In a historical review of tuberculosis, Murray (2004) writes:

Styblo moved to the Netherlands after the unsuccessful Prague Spring, and became a Dutch citizen in 1971. He was still active when he died suddenly on 13 March 1998 at the age of 76; his wife, Lida, predeceased him.

Styblo was a recipient of a 1982 Gold Medal award of the Robert Koch Prizes. The International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Diseases (IUATLD) instituted the Karel Styblo Public Health Prize after his death, to recognize a "health worker (physician or lay-person) or a community organisation for contributions to tuberculosis control or lung health over a period of 10 years or more".

Karel Styblo (26 November 1921, Vilémov – 13 March 1998, The Hague) was a Czech-Dutch physician. Internationally recognized for his work with tuberculosis (TB), he was a medical advisor to the Royal Netherlands Tuberculosis Association, and was named director of the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (IUATLD) in 1979. He is known as the "father of modern TB epidemiology" and the "father of modern TB control".

Styblo was born in Czechoslovakia in 1921. Toward the end of World War II, he was imprisoned at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Austria, where he contracted tuberculosis. After his recovery and release, Styblo entered Charles University in Prague. Obituaries say Styblo studied under Sir John Crofton at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland in the 1950s; the IUATLD says Crofton and Styblo worked together in Edinburgh in the early 50s. Crofton said in an interview that they met in 1960 while Styblo was still in Czechoslovakia.