George W. Hunter III, PhD, was commissioned as a captain in the Sanitary Corps in 1942 and joined the faculty of the Tropical and Military Medicine Course, which expanded from 23 to 200 students.
It was published by the National Research Council in 1945 as the Manual of Tropical Medicine and became the standard reference in its field.
United States forces occupying Japan required food handlers to be free of parasites, and Hunter fielded a mobile laboratory outfitted in railroad cars that tested nearly nineteen thousand Japanese over a four-month period in 1949.
Hunter concentrated his research effort on that endemic problem, and by 1951 his team had eliminated it in the Nagatoishi district of Kurume City, Japan, using a landmark program of molluscicides to control the snail host.
Hunter became a public figure in Japan, and in 1952 the townspeople of Kurume erected a bust of him as a permanent tribute to their "great benefactor.