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Greetings!
Student fieldwork is one of the most important and life-changing components of a global health education at Duke. Read about the experiences of two students in today's newsletter. The deadline for applying for student summer fieldwork is Tuesday, November 30th.
There's plenty of other good news this week. Check it out below.
DGHI will be closed for Thanksgiving starting Wednesday at 12:30 pm through Friday. From everyone at DGHI, we wish you a safe and relaxing Thanksgiving.
Until next week,
Geelea Seaford and Everyone at DGHI
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Students' Adaptability and Community Focus Make for a Successful Global Health Field Experience
Sneha Shah with Ugandan children | Students often describe their fieldwork experience through the Duke Global Health Institute as a defining moment in their time at Duke. The experience helps them gain a deeper understanding of the complex global health challenges that exist today as well as grow as a global health scholar.
As the first recipient of the DGHI-administered Aalok S. Modi Global Health Fieldwork Fund, Junior Sneha Shah worked with community members and business owners in Naama, Uganda last summer to develop and implement a pilot emergency medical insurance system that provides fast and efficient transportation to the local hospital and promotes planning for emergencies such as childbirth. With a special focus on maternal health, Shah's aim for the project was to address the area's high rate of preventable deaths among child-bearing women. She describes her experience as transformative.
"I grappled with a lot of questions of purpose and how to respond to setbacks in the beginning," said Shah, "and I emerged from this experience with more clarity, understanding, receptiveness and passion for all the elements surrounding the kind of life I want to lead-a life dedicated to service."
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Duke to Lead Oversight of HIV Laboratories Worldwide
Denny to lead initiative | The National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has awarded Duke University Medical Center up to $52.8 million over the next seven years to support the development, implementation and oversight of external quality assurance programs that monitor laboratories involved in HIV/AIDS research and vaccine trials around the world.
The project, External Quality Assurance Oversight Laboratory (EQAPOL), will be led by Thomas Denny, MSc, professor of medicine, chief operating officer of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute and affiliate of the Duke Global Health Institute.
"This is critical work, and I believe the contract is a tribute to the extraordinary depth and reach of our research and support teams in the Duke Human Vaccine Institute," said Nancy Andrews, MD, PhD, dean of the Duke University School of Medicine.
Reliable and reproducible laboratory data are essential in evaluating treatments for HIV infection. Denny says there are several dozen laboratories globally that perform assays for HIV studies. "The absence of a single, centralized laboratory makes it imperative that strict quality assurance standards and protocols are in place. Patients, physicians and researchers all need to feel confident that a test on a blood sample performed in New York will yield the same results as the same test performed in London or South Africa as an example. Today, you might not find that."
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| Ethics Plays Role in Global Health Student's Bhutanese Refugee Resettlement Project
Photo by Duke Photography | It was a combination of doing community-based research for a summer service project for the Service Opportunities in Leadership Program, an interest in global and cross-cultural health in Duke's Global Health Institute, and participation in Suzanne Shanahan's class on ethical and health-related issues surrounding refugee resettlement that Benjamin Duke Scholar Rui Jiang, a senior and global health certificate student, found herself talking about food with Bhutanese refugees who had recently resettled in Durham.
Jiang spent the summer as part of the Kenan Institute for Ethics' Working Group on Bhutanese Refugees, doing language tutoring through Church World Service and researching how family eating habits and food customs change with resettlement. "I wanted to know how resettlement had affected the health and food traditions of this group of people," she says. "What kinds of foods are they eating here? What are the factors that are changing their food habits and practices?"
She describes how the refugees had a very specific diet in the camps because their food was provided to them in rationed distributions. Jiang went into her research thinking she might find signs of food insecurity. "I wondered if the refugees were worried about having enough food here, about where their food would come from, about whether there were safe and available means of obtaining food." In fact, she says she found quite the opposite. "They felt there was more than enough readily available food."
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In the Media
: Duke to house HIV vaccine testing (Thomas Denny)
- The New York Times: Letter from India: Understanding the Puzzling Nature of Poverty ( Anirudh Krishna) - Med India: Scientists Discover Why So Many Antibodies Are Ineffective in Blocking HIV Infection ( Barton Haynes) - Chicago Tribune: Haiti's agony: Cholera epidemic further stigmatizes ( Deborah Jenson) |
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Melissa Watt, PhD | Global Health Research
Study Shows Group Interventions May Provide Support for HIV Patients in Tanzania
A DGHI-affiliated study has found that group interventions can be an optimal way to harness social support for HIV patients undergoing antiretroviral therapy (ART), in addition to reducting stigma and improving adherence to therapy.
Led by DGHI Associate in Research Melissa Watt, the study published in Global Public Health included 28 ART patients who attended a four-hour group intervention and half of them brought someone they identified as a potential supporter. Participants rated the intervention favourably and said they gained knowledge about adherence, felt empowered to tackle stigma and disclosure of their HIV-positive status, and experienced reductions in feelings of loneliness. Supporters reported that they learned how to provide better care, gained knowledge and felt closer to the person they were taking care of. |
Global Health Opportunities
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