Global public health center provides solutions across continents
October 10, 2007
Every year more than 200,000 mothers bleed to death during childbirth—99 percent of them from developing countries. With the School of Public Health's new Center for Global Public Health (CGPH), Malcom Potts, Bixby Professor of Population and Family Planning, plans to reduce that number by half within six years, using low-cost technologies to prevent postpartum hemorrhaging. This commitment is one of many initiatives progressing under the umbrella of the new center, led by Eva Harris, associate professor and associate dean of research. The center was established in July 2007 with core funding from the UC Berkeley campus.
"Eva Harris is the ideal person to lead the center in its early development given the range of her expertise and experience in implementing the results of her lab-based research to benefit individuals and communities," says Dean Stephen Shortell.
CGPH has a multi-faceted mission, the heart of which is to draw together the wealth of long-term international research at the School into a multidisciplinary unit addressing cross-cutting themes in global public health on a large scale.
"More than half of the School of Public Health faculty currently engages in global health research and training with populations on five continents," says Harris. "The Center for Global Public Health will synergize and expand on this research to ensure that the collective output is greater than the sum of its parts."
CGPH will also partner with other departments and centers on campus, with universities including UCSF and UC Davis, and with nonprofit and governmental organizations. "The center will serve as a forum for engaging with other related initiatives," says Dean Shortell, "such as the Blum Center for Developing Economies, the Center for Neglected Diseases, and UCSF's Global Health Science Initiative."
This forum will bring together clinicians, scientists, sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and others to collaborate, evaluate, translate, and implement their research products throughout the world. The center will educate and stimulate debate among policy makers, implementing agencies, and the public to raise awareness of issues in global public health and potential solution pathways.
Another important goal is to provide support for School of Public Health students who want to travel internationally for field work. "Right now it is often very difficult for our students to find funding for travel abroad," says Harris. "We'd like to see more Public Health graduate and undergraduate students be able to work internationally, both because their contributions in the field can be enormous and because it is invaluable experience for them."
The Time is Ripe for Partnership
With global slum populations estimated to reach two billion in less than 30 years, global warming contributing to increases in environmental hazards, and new innovations in technology that can improve health programs in developing countries—the formation of a global public health nucleus is timely. School faculty members have already been conducting studies addressing diverse issues in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East for decades.
"The School of Public Health is known for long-term international collaborations in the field," says Harris. "These are not superficial studies; almost all are 10- to 30-year partnerships with colleagues overseas."
The data from these studies has potential to be even more useful when shared amongst colleagues in the center. Harris explains, "We can take what’s already been done and look at it from a different perspective—integrating another discipline or another disease. We are really ripe for partnership within the School as well as abroad."
CGPH leaders have catalogued the wealth of research on global public health at the School and organized it into many cross-cutting themes. These include slum health, health and information technology, maternal health, bringing vaccines to scale, global warming and carbon credits, and healthcare workforce analysis among others.
For example, center members plan to help the currently one billion people of the world’s urban population who live in settlements defined by the United Nations as slums. Health care expenditures of nations often do not take into consideration the cost of management of the disease complications of people who are often not even officially recognized to exist. "If this problem is not addressed now," says Lee Riley, professor of epidemiology and infectious diseases, "the world will face financial crises that are likely to exceed what it now faces with AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria."
The center's multidisciplinary research core will partner with NGOs, local governments, and other campus organizations in order to identify key diseases that could be targeted by locally-available intervention strategies. Pilot studies in Salvador, Brazil, and Bombay, India—locations where SPH faculty members have already been conducting field projects—will be used to develop strategies that can be generalized to other urban slum communities of the world to alleviate health problems and poverty.
"The potential to take action and improve health on a global scale is just enormous," says Harris. "We have a chance to do something beyond our own research projects and serve a larger purpose.'
