Dr. John Nkengasong

speaker

208 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 9 Jul

Dr. John Nkengasong’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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And when I came back and explained to my wife, she said, are you okay?

I mean, you have a permanent job here and you want to go take a contract for one year.

I liked it because it was, you needed to knock down an abandoned building at the infectious disease unit and then build a lab from scratch.

That's the kind of challenge that I wanted to do.

But I said, if we do, the US CDC is very resource.

And I love the scientists there.

I said, if we actually do it right,

The lab can serve the whole region and the sub-region, and that became a platform.

Fast forward, by the time I left, it became a regional platform for treating HIV patients and for conducting virology for HIV as a whole.

Absolutely.

In all my career, and I've just retired from the U.S.

CDC after 30 years, I never walked into a job that existed.

So I always took a job that I had to create that job.

Then fast forward, when I moved to the CDC headquarters in Atlanta, PEPFAR was created.

That is the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.

But there were no laboratories.

So I showed my hand up.

I said I wanted to start creating.

So I created a whole new branch in Atlanta and got that accredited.

And that is the lab that was used in training Africans that came from all over the countries that we were supporting.

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