Gino Strada, Galli: “He wasn’t well but he still had a lot to do”

The years of university together, mutual friends, debates and professional discussions on the occasion of epidemics, from Ebola to Covid: this is how the infectious disease specialist of the Sacco hospital and of the State University of Milan, Massimo Galli, remembers his friend Gino Strada in an interview with Adnkronos. The founder of Emergency died at the age of 73. “It had been understood for some time that he was not well, but it was still a sudden event”, says Galli, saying he was “very sorry and regretful for an absolutely premature death: it is a real shame that he left so soon, he still had a lot to to be able to do “. The founder of Emergency and the head of Infectious Diseases of the Sack met at the time of university, despite Strada being of greater age. “He was from ’48, I’m from 51, but I was a year ahead, so we found each other quite close even during the university course”, says Galli, immediately after closing a phone call with a mutual friend, recalling “moments lived together with that great figure who was Gino Strada, one of the most lively intelligences I have ever met”. In addition to studying medicine, the two shared “the years of our youth, years in which we worked hard, took ourselves very seriously and thought we could change the world. Then the world hasn’t changed much: in some things it has changed even for the worse but in something – and his work is testimony of this – even for the better “, underlines the infectious disease specialist who di Strada is keen to remember:” He contributed in a truly very relevant way to improve the lives of many particularly unfortunate people and to try to remedy distortions that are blatantly evident in some of the most disadvantaged places in the world ever. He made an incredible journey that led to this important reality that is Emergency “. The relations between Strada and Galli in recent years had been thinning out: “Both he and I are two working animals, so for a long time there was no more space for conviviality, but we felt at least once a year and not for Christmas greetings. During the Ebola epidemic he wanted my opinion on a series of issues and also during this last story (the Covid pandemic, ed) we spoke several times “. Although they were business phone calls, “every time I heard him it was a pleasure, it was remembering through him the years in which we were young and a whole series of pleasant memories and experiences”. One in particular is dear to Massimo Galli: the marriage of Gino Strada to Teresa Sarti, co-founder and president of Emergency, who died in 2009. “He was one of the first of us to get married, he was ahead in that too! with a great woman, Teresa “, emphasizes the head physician, reporting that at the time of the wedding the founder of Emergency” must have been 25 years old, so I was 22. And in a period in which we were all very busy and convinced that we wanted to change the world , this thing about marriage seemed really great to us, we also had ideological observations to make. ”And so at the wedding in Milan between Strada and Sarti,“ we looked at each other with the air of saying ‘is it a party or what is it?’ , says Galli, for which the episode “seen now through the lens of past years” represents “an exclamation point of how young we were”.