State Public-Health Pioneer Dr. Walvin Giedt Dies At 94

The state's public-health laboratory in Shoreline stands as a tribute to the contributions of Dr. Walvin Giedt.

Each day, 110 workers come and go at the state Department of Health lab, built in 1985 for $8.2 million and named that year for Dr. Giedt, 14 years after he retired as the department's epidemiologist and chief of laboratories for nearly three decades.

At a dedication of the building, speakers cited his leadership from 1943 to 1971, a time of rapid development in clinical and environmental public health, said his daughter Carol Giedt Ver Wiebe.

Dr. Giedt died Thursday (Sept. 30) of pneumonia at the age of 94. Since a hip injury in July, he had lived in a Capitol Hill convalescent center.

Soon after his arrival in Seattle from South Dakota in 1942, the Port of Tacoma was quarantined because rats were carrying plague-bearing fleas, said his daughter, of Fort Wayne, Ind.

"Through his medical detective work, he discovered that the fleas were coming from field mice arriving with grain from Central Washington," she said. He "developed a method of controlling the field mice invasion and allowed the port to reopen."

Ver Wiebe said her father was West Coast team leader for the Jonas Salk polio trials, and was an internationally recognized specialist in the study and treatment of Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

"One of the areas in which he had a great interest was diseases of animals communicable to man," she said. He also was instrumental

in establishing an international organization in his field.

Dr. Giedt, a native of Eureka, S.D., was a graduate of the University of South Dakota and Rush Medical School at the University of Chicago in 1937, according to family members. He earned his master's degree in public health from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

After retirement in 1971, he and his wife, Lois, moved to Hood Canal and Bremerton, returning to Seattle in 1994.

"They enjoyed travel and took their last trip abroad at the age of 82 when they toured Australia, New Zealand and Tahiti," his daughter said. For him, "the trip to Tahiti was a return to a place he had visited as a young sailor in the 1920s," she said. He had served in the Navy as a medic before attending college.

In Bremerton, Dr. Giedt served on the board of the Bremerton Symphony Association, the World Without War Council and Friends of the (Kitsap County) Library. He was active in Seattle's University Unitarian Church and later the Unitarian Fellowship in Bremerton.

A memorial service is set for Nov. 13, at a time to be set later, at the W.R. Giedt lab building, said his daughter.

Dr. Giedt also is survived by daughter Barbara Giedt of Seattle, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. His wife died in 1995.