Why do infectious diseases emerge where they do? What makes them spread so quickly? Where do we look for the next one?
Our world is connected more than ever before by global travel and trade, by technology and by our microbes. Join us for a discussion that examines the connections between human, animal and environmental health, and discover how specialists in India and around the world track and respond to disease outbreaks.
The exhibition is part of an ongoing project at the Harvard Global Health Institute that aims to raise awareness about the factors contributing to infectious disease epidemics.
Ashish Jha
Dean for Global Strategy
K.T. Li Professor of Global Health
Director, Harvard Global Health Institute
Kayla Laserson
Adjunct Lecturer of Epidemiology
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Dr. Preetha Rajaraman
U.S. Health Attaché for India and Regional
Representative for South Asia, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
Join us for our ongoing India Seminar Series to discuss the growing challenge of Water Fluorosis, in a discussion titled, ‘Tackling Fluorosis: Innovative technology as a solution to the spreading health crisis’
There are about 66 million people in India suffering from toxic levels of fluoride in their drinking water, these are mostly poor people in rural communities in dry / arid area that must depend of groundwater as their drinking water source. Fluoride is a vicious toxic ion in the sense that it affects and attacks the poor far more aggressively that it affects those nutritionally better off. It also is very effective in ruining the lives of very young people who then suffer from serious bone deformation (skeletal fluorosis) and its harmful economic, social, and psychological effects.
The panelists for this discussion include,
– Dr. Andrew Z. Haddad- ITRI-Rosenfeld Postdoctoral Fellow, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
– Srikrishna Sridhar Murthy- Founder and CEO, Sattva Consulting
– Dr. Sunderrajan Krishnan- Executive Director, INREM Foundation
Ramanan Laxminarayan, Vice President for Research and Policy at the Public Health Foundation of India; Director, Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy in Washington DC; Research Scholar and Lecturer at Princeton University
Professor Laxminarayan is Vice President for Research and Policy at the Public Health Foundation of India. He is an economist and epidemiologist by training. His research work deals with the integration of epidemiological models of infectious diseases and drug resistance into the economic analysis of public health problems.
Prof Laxminarayan also directs the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy in Washington DC, and is a Research Scholar and Lecturer at Princeton University.
Co-sponsored with the India Health Partnership in the Department of Global Health and Population, and the Harvard Global Health Institute
Omar Ishrak, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Medtronic
Discussant: Conor Walsh,Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Chair: Tarun Khanna, Director, Harvard South Asia Institute,Jorge Paulo LemannProfessor, Harvard Business School
Over the last several decades, medical technology advancements have steadily improved the standard of care for patients in many areas of the world. At the same time, a huge disparity in access to high quality, cost-effective healthcare continues to exist for billions of people. The need in South Asia is particularly acute, with access to care limited to less than 10% of an estimated population of nearly 2 billion people. Innovation must address significant barriers, including a lack of patient awareness, infrastructure and training for healthcare professionals. Medtronic has started a unique program in India using a new business model to target a specific disease, define the full care continuum and build an ecosystem approach to address populations with little to no access to care. Addressing this huge challenge – and opportunity – requires a coordinated effort across multiple stakeholders to deliver innovation to improve outcomes, expand access and increase affordability of healthcare in South Asia.
Thomas Vallely, Senior Advisor, Mainland Southeast Asia, Ash Center, Harvard Kennedy School
Dr. Cynthia Maung, Director, Mae Tao Clinic, Thai-Burmese Border
Dr. Parveen K. Parmar, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, Community Partners International
Phyu Phyu Saan, Senior Researcher, Global Justice Center, New York
Chair: Arthur Kleinman, Director, Harvard University Asia Center; Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University; Professor of Medical Anthropology and Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
A billion people, or one-seventh of the world’s population, now live in slums in developing country cities. Mumbai, India, possibly has the world’s largest population of slum dwellers: 50-60% of its population lives in informal settlements on <9% of the city’s land area. A significant proportion of those slum residents live in “non-notified” settlements that lack any legal recognition, resulting in their exclusion from formal municipal services such as water, sanitation, and electricity. From 2009 to 2012, a team of researchers from PUKAR (a Mumbai-based research collective), the Harvard School of Public Health, and NYU engaged in an interdisciplinary project investigating health in a non-notified slum of 14,000 people. With support from the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard, several new findings have emerged from these data in the last year that the research team wishes to disseminate to the public. This event will consist of a few short presentations of original research findings followed by reflections on the findings by professors from the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Presentations:
“Why Illegality is Deadly” Ramnath Subbaraman,PUKAR; Research Fellow in Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital.
“A Novel Household Coding System and GPS Mapping for Facilitating Research and Advocacy” Dana Thomson,Research Associate in Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
“Water Poverty in Slums: A Social Ecological Framework” Alpen Sheth,PhD Candidate, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Measuring Water Poverty: Insights from Kaula Bandar” Laura Nolan,PhD Candidate in the Office of Population Research, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University.
“Does Living in a Slum Take a Psychological Toll? Evidence and Reflections on Social Suffering in our Urbanizing World” Ramnath Subbaraman, PUKAR; Research Fellow in Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital.
Reflections and Conversation:
David Bloom, Clarence James Gamble Professor of Economics and Demography, Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard School of Public Health.
Rahul MehrotraChair, Department of Urban Planning and Design; Professor of Urban Design and Planning, Harvard Graduate School of Design.
‘Indian healthcare: Reforms, results and road ahead’ Sofi Bergkvist, Managing Director, ACCESS Health International
‘Open Secret : Parallel Systems and Human Resource Management in India’s Public Health Service: A View from the Front Lines’ Jerry La Forgia,Lead Health Specialist, World Bank
Chair: Peter Berman, Professor of the Practice of Global Health Systems and Economics; Director, GHP Educational Initiatives, Harvard School of Public Health
Sofi Bergkvist is the founding Managing Director of ACCESS Health International. ACCESS Health identifies, analyzes and supports in the design of healthcare service delivery and financing models for high quality and low-cost healthcare. She is also is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Emerging Markets Solutions at the Indian School of Business, where she focuses on health financing and public private partnerships in health.
Jerry La Forgia is a Lead Health Specialist at the World Bank. He devises policies and strategies, conducts policy dialogue with clients and designs and supervises Bank lending operations. He is also leading several policy research tasks in health. Dr. La Forgia specializes in health finance and management.
Diego Bassani,Assistant Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto
Chair: SV Subramanian, Professor of Population Health and Geography in the Department of Society, Human Development and Health, Harvard School of Public Health
