His father was a Kenyan politician (freedom fighter and colonial-era political detainee, district representative and once chairman of the North Nyanza Local Native Council[14]), an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and a veteran of World Wars I and II.
His epidemiological medical research of the East African Leishmaniasis or kala-azar (black fever) has bred critical knowledge for worldwide use in both private and public health sectors, and civil societies.
He promoted and nurtured coordinated approaches, amongst healthcare practitioners and related bodies, to facilitate the most effective seamlessly integrated dispensary and operations of public health and other civic and societal welfare services.
As of 1950 until his abrupt and inexplicable death in 1966, he is credited with stemming the tide of numerous endemic and pandemic diseases in the East and Central African regions and the Sudan.
[8][31] In October 1952, Oriedo's skills were put to the test when he was named to lead efforts to stem a major epidemic outbreak of a deadly parasitic visceral leishmaniasis (black fever) in Kenya, Uganda, and the Sudan.
[citation needed] In 1960 the colonial authorities tasked him with formulating a roadmap to guide and coordinate an interterritorial, interdisciplinary and interagency crisis-management team to deal with a kwashiorkor crisis—a disease with high mortality-rates among infants and children.
While fighting disease epidemics across the region he remarked on the decrepit infrastructure in large the areas of the country to the detriment of socioeconomic, healthcare, and intellectual progress.
In 1965, upon his return from a conference in the Netherlands and other official engagements in Europe, he summarily terminated the employment of several expatriates and native personnel for graft, ineptitude, and absconding from duty.
[36] His actions met with ad hominem assaults from a cadre of bureaucrats and political elites; nevertheless, he stood his ground and refused to be intimidated into rescinding the edicts.
contemporaries from across East Africa flocked to his residence to indulge in social intercourse—interchange of ideals and ideas, entertainment, debate local and international affairs and geopolitics du jour.
His associates included Tom Mboya (d. 1969)—with whom they were confidantes; Sir Philip Edmund Clinton Manson-Bahr (d. 1966)—the son-in-law of Sir Patrick Mason, the doyen founder of the field of tropical medicine; Dr. Apollo Milton Obote—led Uganda to independence from Britain in 1962, becoming Prime Minister and the President twice; Prof. Hillary Ojiambo; Masinde Muliro; Charles Njonjo; Kitili Maluki Mwendwa; Elijah Wasike Mwangale; Paul Ngei; Fred Kubai; Achieng Oneko; Joseph Otiende; Dr Julius Gikonyo Kiano; Argwings Kodhek; Dr. B.
It has been argued that his uncle played an influencing role in Dr. BV Oriedo's decision to actualize a healthcare vocation even though his father had wanted him to pursue a business and political careers.
[41] He remonstratively rebuffed the appointment; in 1951 he was actualized as a senior public health officer with de jure commission which permitted him to serve across the East and Central African region.
At that same period, at the age nineteen, he became the youngest native person in the East and Central African region to autonomously engage in active interdisciplinary medical research in epidemiology and parasitology.
[46][Notes 3] In 1950 he was selected to lead a handful of medical students from Kenya to attend the Conference of the World Health Organization on Malaria at Kampala, Uganda.
Albeit tenured both at the Nairobi-based Division of Insect-Borne Diseases at Medical Research Laboratory[Notes 6], and the Ministry of Health and Housing during and post-colonial British rule, he shunned the city comforts du jour in the interest of serving the aboriginal populations of the African Great Lakes region, going to the fore personally.
He spent most of his time in disease-ravaged remote villages, meticulously implementing curative and preventative measures; recording observations and mapping out diseases, authoring and disseminating reports.
As of 1950 until his abrupt and inexplicable death in 1966, he is credited with stemming the tide of numerous endemic and pandemic diseases in the East and Central African regions and the Sudan; and a forfending of thousands of human lives.
[47][48][49][50][51][52] In October 1952 the young BV Oriedo's skills were put to the test when he was tasked to lead efforts to stem a major epidemic outbreak of black fever disease in Kenya, and parts of Uganda.
He took a hands-on approach relocated himself to the remote hinterland outpost District Hospital and Public Health Office at Kitui in Kenya; the region hard-hit by the epidemic.
In 1960, based on his prior successful campaigns against epidemic disease outbreaks, colonial authorities gave Oriedo the job of creating a roadmap to guide and coordinate the kwashiorkor crisis management team.
Teachers were required to check pupils for health and hygiene during physical education (PE) periods and schools were charged with keeping up-to-date student immunisation records.
[Notes 7] During the late 1950s and 1960s he championed, coordinated, and buoyed the campaign against malaria amongst African and Asian communities in East Africa where the disease epidemics was poignantly endemic and had exacted a heavy mortality toll.
In 1960 he was one of the key architects of a dynamical interdisciplinary multicomponent and multigenerational public health, a healthcare and hygiene strategy of long-term planning based on the application of preventative modalities that helped shift the medical science paradigm—in East Africa—away from the undue emphasis on curative means, and more so towards a balanced approach; that which seeks to adapt public health strategies that effectively integrates epidemiological, parasitological, and etiological knowledge with tactical and situational curative approaches.The desired key outcomes included the prevention of disease or infectious agents, disability, malnutrition, and mortality rate—especially among the vulnerable populations of children, youth, and young adults—by means of immunization, hygiene, nutrition (e.g., providing free fluid whole milk for school children as part of his campaign against kwashiorkor epidemic outbreaks), and dietary supplement with multivitamins, and by control of contagious, parasitic and related diseases.
Antecedently, he embraced a revolutionary du jour epidemiological perspective towards the economic and intellectual consequences of disease or public health strategy across the East African region.
Southgate, the creation of a peer-reviewed comprehensive healthcare reference database for East Africa akin to the United States National Library of Medicine.
In the late 1950s (and thereafter) he was a silent force behind the fostering of indispensable rapports with likeminded contemporaries abroad that led to the inception of higher education opportunities in North America for talented East African students.
The higher education initiative (concept of opportunities in North America) resonated very well with his confidante and compatriot, Thomas Joseph Odhiambo "Tom" Mboya (d. July 1969)—a political figure in Kenya's liberation movement.
Tom Mboya played a key role in securing air transportation to North America, in September 1959, for the initial eighty-one students with scholarship in the United States and Canada.
However, the fratricidal tribal politics du jour prevented the Kenyan national legislative body from adopting the de jure process to implement this meritorious proposal by the Ministry of Health and Housing.