Monday, February 3, 2014

Welcome to Intro to Global Health Course

Hi Everyone, This is Jim.  Welcome again to the Intro to Global Health Course, Spring 2014 semester.
This blog is offered to those of you who would like additional interaction and information outside the textbooks, readings, and class discussion.  I will typically revisit an issue discussed in class, and then pose a series of questions (Qs).  Have fun!   Jim


Female anopheles mosquito taking a blood meal
THE DEFINTION OF GLOBAL HEALTH: During the first class I stressed that one major difference between "international health" and "global health" is that the latter "emphasizes transnational health issues, determinants, and solutions [and] involves many disciplines within and beyond the health sciences and promotes interdisciplinary collaboration," as described in the Koplan et al paper.  When you think of interdisciplinary collaboration, who are we talking about?  

Photo Source: Media NPR
One example is the issue of substandard, falsified, fake, and counterfeit (SFFC) antimalarials.  A former student of mine, Gaurvika Nayyar, researched the literature a couple of years ago in order to understand the extent of this problem.  In the paper published in Lancet, she reported that over 1/3 of the antimalarials tested (N=1,437 Southeast Asia; N=2,634 in sub-Saharan Africa) failed packaging and/or chemical analysis. The ability of the counterfeiters to copy the real thing is remarkable.  Check out these photos of fake and real holograms.  

So, to combat the issue of SFFC antimalarials, these interdisciplinary teams may benefit from the skills of pharmacologists (who know drugs), forensic scientists (can see real vs fake in an analysis), chemists (to test the suspect compounds), law enforcement (to trace the smugglers' routes from source to point-of-sale, and economists (to tally up the costs). 

Qs: Who else should be on the team, and why?  What are other corollaries to this problem and what can we learn from them, e.g., tobacco smuggling?   If you were in charge, how would you tackle this problem?  Who should lead point, among the team members?  What would be the desired outcome you would want?  

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