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My buddy Peter Greaves, who has died aged 89, was a well being and diet officer for Unicef whose work made an enormous distinction to youngsters’s lives around the globe. He was an early advocate of low-cost interventions together with immunisation, oral rehydration and breastfeeding.
Whereas he was Unicef’s chief diet adviser within the mid-Nineteen Eighties, he managed to get Unicef and the World Well being Group to agree on the ultimate draft of The Ten Steps to Profitable Breastfeeding. This doc helped remodel world maternal care insurance policies.
Born in Cardiff, the son of Methodist missionaries, Stella (nee Cox) and Lionel Greaves, Peter spent a lot of his early childhood in Kenya. He boarded at Kingswood faculty, Tub, then went to Jesus Faculty, Cambridge, to check biochemistry, graduating in 1955. This was adopted by a PhD in diet on the Royal Free hospital, College Faculty London – and a crash course in tank-driving throughout nationwide service in Germany.
From 1959 he was in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), for 2 years, as a senior scientific adviser on the East African Institute for Medical Analysis, earlier than transferring again to London to work on the British Vitamin Basis.
He joined the UN Meals and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in 1969, working first in Cairo, after which in Beirut as a well being and diet officer. After three years working because the FAO adviser to Unicef New Delhi, he left that organisation to hitch Unicef full-time, the place he spent the remainder of his working life.
In 1980 Peter grew to become Unicef’s regional officer for South America in Brazil. There he arrange a programme for road youngsters in Rio, offering them with training, part-time work, a secure place to sleep and a scorching meal. He additionally launched a extremely profitable breastfeeding programme. In 1983 his group developed a main healthcare plan to sort out the appalling toddler mortality charge within the poorest Brazilian state, Maranhão, leading to a 33% discount in toddler mortality. The programme was taken up by the Brazilian authorities and prolonged throughout the entire nation.
He moved in 1984 from Brazil to the Unicef HQ in New York as chief diet adviser. His colleague Margaret Kyenkya-Isabitye recalled: “He was the spine, the glue, that held the diet part collectively.”
Peter’s dedication to good causes didn’t cease on his retirement in 1992. He joined the United Nations Affiliation, which is how I met him, and campaigned on many points, together with local weather change, and wrote common letters to nationwide newspapers (together with his final one, revealed within the Guardian in November 2021). Within the phrases of his son, Tim, “he’s undoubtedly a kind of uncommon individuals who has left this world a greater, a extra beneficiant and kinder place than he discovered it”.
He’s survived by his spouse, Chloe (nee Morgan), an actor whom he married in 1957, Tim, a daughter, Kate, and 4 grandchildren.
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