Dr Zafrullah Chowdhury, the founder of Gonoshasthaya Kendra and a freedom fighter of the Liberation War, breathed his last this evening at Gonoshasthaya Nagar Hospital where he was on life support, according to the doctors there. He was 81 years old.
“He breathed his last around 11.35pm,” a spokesman of the Gonoshasthaya Nagar Hospital said, adding that he was admitted to the facility in city’s Dhanmondi area on April 5, which he found as well, and was put under a life support system on April 10 as his condition deteriorated.
Chowdhury was a prominent civil society activist, a vascular surgeon, and a public health expert. He was known for designing the 1982 National Drug Policy that made expensive medicines affordable and accessible to common people.
He joined the Liberation War as a medical student in the UK and established a major field hospital under Sector 2 during the war. After the independence, he founded the Ganosasthya Kendra in Savar in 1972.
He said that Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman named the facility himself. Later, the center expanded into a medical college, a pharmaceutical industry, and two big hospitals, one in Dhaka.
He was suffering largely due to kidney ailment alongside liver problems and Septicemia since he was inflicted by Covid-19. But his death came hours after doctors said he was responding to the treatment.
Son of Humayun Morshed Chowdhury, a student of anti-British movement revolutionary Masterda Surya Sen, Chowdhury was born on December 27, 1941 in Rawzan upazila of Chattogram district.
