The Duke Global Health Institute has selected 15 students for the inaugural Student Research Training Program.  Students will learn how to develop and implement a community-based project in global health and spend eight weeks in the field this summer conducting their projects. In its first year, the research-oriented field program has attracted undergraduate students from many majors, and with previous global health experience that spans the globe.  

"We are delighted to announce the selection of the first group of students for the program," said Lysa MacKeen, fieldwork coordinator for DGHI. "This impressive group has worked in China, Honduras, Egypt, Kenya, Mexico and Uganda, as well as many locations in the US.  They bring to the program these experiences as well as their previous research and campus-wide global health activities."

Students were selected for the program based on their scholarship, past experiences and their demonstrated commitment to global health.  

By Duke Medicine

A commonly held theory says that flu virus persists in Southeast and Eastern Asia, making this region the source of seasonal flu epidemics in other parts of the world.

However, researchers at Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore have found that influenza A virus doesn't persist in those tropical regions as the only global source of annual epidemics. The international team of scientists, involved in the work, who were led by Duke-NUS associate professor Gavin Smith found that any one of the urban centers they studied could act as a source for an epidemic in any other locality.

"We found that these regions are just one node in a network of urban centers connected by air travel, through which flu virus circulates and causes a series of local epidemics that overlap in time," said Smith, also associate research professor at the Duke Global Health Institute.

The research is published this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.

The research team chose to study influenza A because it is much more prevalent than both influenza B and C. Influenza is a significant cause of human illness and death worldwide-the World Health Organization estimates that 250,000 to 500,000 influenza A related deaths occur per year worldwide, and about 49,000 deaths occur in the United States.

The team obtained RNA sequences of virus samples from 2003 to 2006 in Australia, Europe, Japan, New York, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia, as well as some more recently sequenced viruses from Hong Kong.