William Jordan, 90; Focused on Vaccine Research

During World War II, he served with the National Naval Medical Center and was first stationed in Reykjavik, Iceland, and then with the Tropical Disease Service, where he treated Marines who came down with filariasis and malaria in the South Pacific. He also served as a medical officer at sea.

Dr. Jordan began his career in medical research in 1947 at Western Reserve University in Cleveland in the preventive medicine department. He and his colleagues started a long-term study of illness patterns in middle-class families and discovered that acute respiratory infections and viral gastroenteritis, often called stomach flu, were the most common causes of illness in those families. Dr. Jordan's laboratory contributed findings on pandemic influenza and the transmission of adenovirus.

The Cleveland Family Study is regarded as an epidemiological classic.

In 1958, Dr. Jordan moved to the University of Virginia's medical school to chair its preventive medicine department. He also was director of the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board's Commission on Acute Respiratory Diseases.

He later became dean of the University of Kentucky's medical school and spent a year at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to study the role of the community physician in the British National Health Service. From this experience, he wrote "Community Medicine in the United Kingdom" (1978).

By the time he joined NIAID in 1976, he was an established vaccine researcher.

Dr. Jordan led delegations from the United States to the Soviet Union for joint meetings on interferon and influenza research. After his retirement from NIH, he was an adviser to the National Vaccine Program Office.

He was past president of the NIH Alumni Association, the American Epidemiology Society and the Society of Medical Consultants to the Armed Forces.

His wife of 51 years, Marion Anderson Jordan, died in 1998.

Survivors include two children, Marion A. Jordan of Potomac and William S. Jordan III of Akron, Ohio; a brother; and three grandchildren.