4/13/23 Grand Rounds

Humanism and Global Health: Leveraging Anthropology during an Acute Kidney Injury Outbreak in The Gambia

Speaker:

Parsa Bastani, MBA, PhD
Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer at the
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention

A CDC Epi-Aid team of four arrived in The Gambia in September 2022 to investigate an outbreak of acute kidney injury (AKI) among 78 children (75% under the age of 2 years), 66 of whom died. Parsa Bastani from the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the CDC will describe how his team used epidemiological and anthropological methods to identify exposures and characterize symptoms. He will highlight the ethical challenges of retrospectively assessing exposures through interviews with grieving caregivers. The findings underscore the value of using humanistic, people-center approaches in global health.

Learning Objectives:
    1. Describe how anthropological and epidemiological methods can be used in investigating medical outbreaks.
    2. Discuss the ethical challenges in interviewing grieving caretakers.
    3. Describe the characteristics of a people-centered approach in global heath endeavors.