Head of NIH Fogarty International Center Pushes Ambitious Agenda at Public Health Forum

When Dr. Roger Glass traveled to Zanzibar in 2007 with a U.S. delegation that included Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, he got a lesson in the importance of the long-term sustainability of global health initiatives.

The lesson came courtesy of Zanzibar’s minister of health, who announced to the delegation that his country had eradicated malaria — for the third time. Malaria had been eliminated twice before, in 1950 and 1980, but those anti-malaria programs had not been sustained, leaving an opening for the disease to emerge, yet again.

Roger Glass at Public Health Forum.
Roger Glass at Public Health Forum.

“This is really the issue of program sustainability,” explained Glass, director of the Fogarty International Center and associate director for international research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), who spoke at the March 11 BUSPH public health forum. Building local scientific capacity and converting research findings into practical interventions are keys to sustaining global health gains, he said.

“What the world wants is impact,” Glass told a crowd of faculty, researchers and students. “And impact is not whether (an) article is in the New England Journal — it’s whether lives are being saved.”

In a talk headlined, “Global Health in the 21st Century: New Directions and Perspectives from the Fogarty International Center,” Glass said the center — the smallest of 27 institutes and centers of the NIH — was undertaking an ambitious strategic agenda that balanced new initiatives with unfinished business. The center is focusing on the growing epidemic of chronic, non-communicable diseases related to increased longevity and changing lifestyles in the developing world, he said, while also continuing to address infectious diseases.

“As we think about global diseases in the 21st century, we have to think about chronic diseases,” such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer, Glass said. He noted that life expectancy had been prolonged in recent decades because of improvements in public health and medical treatment. “The global burden of disease has changed,” he said.

He said there was still much work to be done on children’s health issues, especially in resource-poor countries.

“We have a huge discrepancy in terms of who lives and who dies throughout the world,” he said.

After the forum Roger Glass met with students.
After the forum Roger Glass met with students.

Glass, a research leader in the prevention of gastroenteritis from rotaviruses, previously worked as a medical officer for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and maintained field studies in Bangladesh, India, Mexico and other countries. He drew on his own career in encouraging young researchers to “go where the problems are,” saying most of today’s leaders in global health had “early experiences overseas.”

Glass stressed that investments in global health pay off abroad and at home, in terms of their impact on both science and foreign relations. He said international health collaborations are a form of diplomacy that can “open doors.”

Global health research has benefits for Americans, Glass said, because it often sheds light on health problems and inequities within the U.S. He cited research into high rates of infant mortality along the Mexican border, saying the problem is both “a health inequities issue for the U.S. and a global health problem.”

He said there are myriad opportunities for the developing world to “learn from our mistakes.” In China, for example, where smoking is now prevalent, rates of lung cancer are climbing. “This is going to be the biggest killer in China,” as it once was in the U.S., he said.

Jonathon Simon, director of the Center for International Health at BUSPH, introduced Glass, who has received a number of awards for his research and leadership. The two men worked together in the 1980s, said Simon, who called Glass “a remarkably productive scientist” with a deep understanding of research.

Glass succeeded another BUSPH faculty member as head of the Fogarty center. Dr. Gerald Keusch, director of the Global Health Initiative and professor of International Health, was formerly Fogarty’s director.

Glass said that after years of level federal funding, Fogarty was looking forward to additional funding through the recently-approved stimulus package.

The stimulus plan “is the first new money we’ll have at NIH in six or seven years,” he said.

Submitted by Lisa Chedekel
chedekel@bu.edu

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