People in the News

March - April, 2009 | Volume 8, Issue 2

World wants health impact, Glass says Fogarty Director Dr. Roger Glass told a Boston University forum recently that building local scientific capacity and converting research findings into practical interventions are keys to sustaining global health gains. "What the world wants is impact, and impact is not whether (an) article is in the New England Journal—it's whether lives are being saved." Glass explained that investments in global health pay off abroad and at home in terms of both science and foreign relations.

Courtesy, BU

Kim named president of Dartmouth Dr. Jim Yong Kim, a member of Fogarty's Advisory Board, has been named president of Dartmouth College, the first Asian-American to head an Ivy League institution. Kim takes office July 1. He previously had been chair of the global health and social medicine department at Harvard Medical School. "Jim is a visionary and an accomplished leader in global health. When world opinion thought that HIV treatment couldn't be done in the developing world, Jim initiated WHO's first treatment program that became the model for the President's Emergency Program for Aids Relief," said Fogarty Director Dr. Roger Glass.

Grantees publish on male circumcision A team of researchers including several Fogarty grantees from Johns Hopkins and Makerere University in Uganda recently published a major finding in the New England Journal of Medicine that circumcision significantly reduces the incidence of herpes simplex virus type 2 and human papillomavirus infection in men. Previously it was shown that circumcision decreased the incidence of HIV. Support also came from the Gates Foundation and NIAID. Pictured are co-authors Dr. Thomas C. Quinn (left) and Dr. Ronald H. Gray. Other Fogarty-funded co-authors were Dr. David Serwadda and Dr. Maria J. Wawer. http://tinyurl.com/dj6z2s

Photo by Keith Weller, JHU

Courtesy, UNC Gazette

Popkin warns about red meat dangers In an editorial accompanying a National Cancer Institute study warning about excessive red meat in the human diet, Fogarty grantee Dr. Barry Popkin writes in the Archives of Internal Medicine about the link between food coming from animals and global crises affecting water, climate and energy. He cites data that U.S. livestock production accounts for 55 percent of the erosion process, 37 percent of pesticides applied, 50 percent of antibiotics consumed and a third of total discharge of nitrogen and phosphorus to surface water. http://tinyurl.com/cpuzfz

Cynthia Gadd elected informatics fellow Former Fogarty grantee Dr. Cynthia Gadd of Vanderbilt University has been elected a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. Using a Fogarty grant, Gadd developed and directed a medical informatics training program for scientists, clinicians and other health professionals in sub-Saharan Africa so they could use and construct computer-based tools such as automated libraries, on-line communications, databases and analytical software.

Ugandan hailed as PEPFAR inspiration Dr. Peter Mugyenyi, a Fogarty grantee and founding director of Uganda's HIV/AIDS Joint Clinical Research Center, spoke recently at Georgetown University, along with Dr. Mark Dybul, who headed the President's Emergency Program For AIDS Relief, Dybul said, "Without Peter's program, there would not have been a PEPFAR, because the emphasis was not on the commitment of dollars but on how you actually get the job done." http://tinyurl.com/cq4okwv

Malawi trainees featured on radio series The University of North Carolina’s public radio station undertook an in-depth series on public health in Africa, where former Fogarty trainees in AIDS were featured. Among them was Dr. Linda Kalilani, who works in her native Malawi, where one-third of new mothers have AIDS, another third have malaria and 10 percent have both. To read about and hear the series, visit http://tinyurl.com/ca9793.

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