Within six years, Malcolm Potts hopes to halve the number of women dying each year of postpartum hemorrhaging. Each year, more than 200,000 mothers — most in developing countries — bleed to death because of a lack of basic medical care and medicine. Potts, Bixby Professor of Population and Family Planning, is using low-cost technologies — such as misoprostol, an inexpensive, stable drug that helps prevent and treat postpartum hemorrhaging — to combat the problem. His work in maternal health is just one of many initiatives being advanced by the School of Public Health’s new Center for Global Public Health (CGPH).
Established last July, the center was created to engage various units conducting long-term international research and provide them with opportunities to address large-scale public health issues that slice across different disciplines. It is the public health component of the new Berkeley Initiative for Global Health, a campus-wide effort to solve major global health challenges through the integration of life sciences and bioengineering with public health.
“More than half of the School of Public Health faculty currently engages in global health research and training with populations on five continents,” says Eva Harris, associate professor and associate dean of research, who is leading the effort. “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, universities including UCSF and UC Davis, and nonprofit and governmental organizations. “The center will serve as a forum for engaging with other related initiatives,” says Dean Stephen Shortell of the School of Public Health, “such as the Blum Center for Developing Economies and UCSF’s Global Health Science initiative.”
By bringing together clinicians, scientists, sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and others to collaborate, evaluate, translate, and implement their research products throughout the world, the center will help educate and stimulate debate to raise awareness of issues in global public health and potential paths toward solutions. It also will support students’ international fieldwork.
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.
Faculty members have already been conducting studies addressing diverse issues in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East for decades. Sharing the data from these studies among colleagues in the center offers new possibilities. Harris explains, “We can take what’s already been done and look at it from a different perspective — integrating another discipline or another disease.”
To help the world’s one billion people who live in slums, for example, a multidisciplinary research core will partner with nongovernmental organizations, local governments, and other campus organizations to identify key diseases affecting these areas that could be targeted by locally available intervention strategies. Pilot studies in Salvador, Brazil, and Mumbai, India, 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.”
