Roel Coutinho
Dutch physician
Roel Coutinho (born 4 April 1946) is a Dutch medical doctor, microbiologist and former director of the Centre for the Control of Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment.
Biography
After finishing a medical degree in Amsterdam in 1972, Coutinho worked in tropical medicine in Guinea-Bissau and Senegal. During this time, he worked in the areas liberated by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde during the latter stages of the Guinea-Bissau War of Independence. His work brought him into contact with future leaders of Guinea-Bissau, such as Francisco Mendes and Luís Cabral. He subsequently worked on the eradication of smallpox in Bangladesh, the last major outbreak of the disease, the experience of which led him to focus on public health and infectious diseases for his future career.
Upon returning to the Netherlands he specialised in microbiology and in 1977 became head of the Public Health Department of the Amsterdam Municipal Health Service. He completed an internship with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the United States and with the emergence of HIV/AIDS he worked on its suppression. In 1984 he completed his doctorate with a thesis on sexually transmitted diseases amongst men who have sex with men.
In 1989 Coutinho was appointed professor of epidemiology at the Academic Medical Centre of the University of Amsterdam. In 2000, he became co-editor of AIDS, the official journal of the International AIDS Society.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Roel Coutinho” as dutch physician. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2246926. VIAF identifies the subject as 306161660. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1946, 1972, 1977 and 1984.
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This entry incorporates text from “Roel Coutinho” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.