[Léon Lapeyssonnie On the trail to its end]

He would have celebrated his 100th birthday in 2015, but finally, it doesn't matter, since by leaving his name to African meningitis belt, that isohyetal band in sub-Saharan Africa where epidemics of cerebrospinal meningitis are rife, Lapeyssonnie, the trailblazer at the end of his trail, has gone straight into the textbooks of tropical medicine. There was probably nothing he enjoyed more than wandering the lateritic paths and Sudano-Sahelian bush in that zone. His first job, in the Mossi country in Upper Volta that had not yet become Burkina Faso, was of course an initiation. At the age of 27, applying the Jamot doctrine and tracking the vectors of sleeping sickness down into the most remote villages, like his illustrious predecessor, the young physician who became a Physician-General never stopped defending these precepts of tropical public health and promoting the "eccentric battalions" (as the English physicians, Dr Waddy, described them) of bush doctors from the School of Pharo (Army Institute of Tropical Medicine in Marseille). Foreshadowing the French doctors and "without borders" movement, Lapeyssonnie was able to implement the results of research in vaccinology. Thus, in 1974, during a meningitis epidemic in Brazil, he convinced Charles Merieux to manufacture the lifesaving vaccine on a large scale. Merieux then mobilized all the resources of his company to produce and deliver millions of doses of the only vaccine then available. Ten million inhabitants of Sao Paulo were vaccinated in five days, 90 million Brazilians in 6 months. Another victory at the end of the trail. But Lapeyssonnie was more than a man dealing with great endemics, more than a researcher and a teacher. "Those who liked to be taught like to teach in their turn," he liked to repeat, talking about his time at Pharo. Writer and novelist, he could sometimes write poetry, recount the bygone époque when he went out hunting in the African bush and shared with nurses there unique moments of great humanity. It is probably because of this humanity that from his retirement in Brittany, in 2000, a year from the end of his trail, he could still inveigh in the Parisian newspaper, Le Monde, against the bureaucrats at the World Health Organization, who were asleep in the battle against sleeping sickness; his task then was to awaken consciences and Africa so that the populations at the end of the trail would not be forgotten.