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Davida Coady

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Doctor

The Resume

    (April 15, 1938-May 3, 2018)
    Born in Berkeley, California
    Pediatrician, activist
    Treated impoverished refugees worldwide
    Worked as a physician and medical instructor in 35 countries (including Nigeria and India)
    Acting medical director, later assistance program coordinator, for the Peace Corps
    Field epidemiologist for the World Health Organization (WHO)
    Founded Options Recovery Services, an organization dealing with substance abuse issues, in 1996
    Published a memoir, 'The Greatest Good' (2018)

Why she might be annoying:

    She was divorced.
    Her first name (five gets you ten dad wanted a boy).
    She liked to joke that some poverty-stricken Indian villages mistook her for Indira Gandhi.
    She admitted to having a drinking problem throughout the 1980s into the early 1990s.

Why she might not be annoying:

    She was the first member of her family to graduate college.
    She identified Albert Schweitzer as a hero of hers.
    Her work and advocacy earned her audiences with Henry Kissinger and Elliot Richardson.
    She pushed the Nixon administration to enhance its efforts to supply food and medicine to the Biafra region of Nigeria.
    She was unable to resume her relief work in Nigeria due to applied pressure by the military-government.
    Working with WHO, she and her team spent years traveling between rural Indian towns to prevent the spread of Smallpox with vaccinations (by 1980, the disease was declared eradicated from the earth).
    She quit drinking in the mid-1990s, when she witnessed the effects of alcohol abuse on families as an emergency-room pediatrician at a children’s hospital.
    When asked about making the switch from curative to preventative medicine, she answered: 'Public health has always been the stepchild. When you’re a doctor, people say: Oh thank you for curing me or for my surgery, but nobody thanks the public health professional for saving them from smallpox or for their clean water. So you have to be very farsighted to go into public health, because there’s no instant gratification.'

Credit: BoyWiththeGreenHair


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    For 2024, as of last weekly ranking, Out of 1 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2023, Out of 4 Votes: 25.00% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 5 Votes: 40.0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 14 Votes: 78.57% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 5 Votes: 20.0% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 6 Votes: 33.33% Annoying
    In 2018, Out of 13 Votes: 38.46% Annoying