UCSF marks the anniversary of the disaster with a multidisciplinary symposium.

Tsunami waves crashed through windbreak trees and flooded the first floor of Japan's Choushunkan Hospital shortly after a 9.0-magnitude quake struck offshore on March 11, 2011.

A year after disaster struck, the Japanese public continues to be concerned about radiation contamination, cleanup, public health and the struggles of those in communities affected by the catastrophic earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor meltdowns.

Like people in the rest of the country and the world, Californians — including UC San Francisco faculty, fellows and students — have pitched in to aid in relief efforts. But Californians are probably more likely than other Americans to wonder if similar disaster scenarios are likely to play out in the near future in the shaky Golden State.

On March 19 ,the UCSF departments of psychiatry and pediatrics and UCSF Global Health Sciences marked the anniversary of the disaster with a multidisciplinary symposium, “The Great East Japan Earthquake and Disasters: One Year Later,” featuring first-hand details from several who responded to the calamitous events.

Physicians who cared for those with medical and mental health needs in the disaster zone, experts who have studied radiation exposure and its health effects, an earthquake engineer and professionals who study disaster preparation and recovery worldwide met at UCSF’s Langley Porter Institute auditorium to present findings.

Related: Radiation risks from Fukushima likely to be less than for Chernobyl (Click image to view story)

In introductory remarks Craig Van Dyke, M.D., a UCSF professor of psychiatry, noted that of the 300,000 people displaced by the disaster in Japan, many are still homeless. Some were displaced from ancestral lands where their families had lived for hundreds of years.

The March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami and subsequent reactor meltdowns changed people’s conception of tsunami hazards and nuclear power, Van Dyke said. Only two of 54 nuclear power reactors are still operating, and the remaining two are likely to be shut down. Opposition to nuclear power shows little sign of abating any time soon.

”The events had a profound effect on people’s mental state,” Van Dyke said.

Hospital hardship and tsunami lung

When the earthquake and tsunami struck, Hiroshi Nimura, M.D., who now directs the Kudan Clinic in Tokyo, was director of surgery at Matsumura General Hospital in the disaster-area town of Iwaki, a few miles inland in Fukushima Prefecture, barely outside the current zone evacuated due to radiation. He described the hardships faced by hospital workers and their patients, and in the nearby coastal Choushunkan Hospital, in the wake of the tsunami and earthquake.

Both hospitals maintained electrical power. Workers at Choushunkan Hospital heard the tsunami warning over the radio and evacuated the first floor, which was inundated, within 30 minutes. Nimura said they were able to vacate quickly because they had prepared according to guidelines from a Chilean earthquake emergency manual.

Nimura made his way back to Matsumura General Hospital over several hours. The hospital was outside the tsunami zone, but suffered from non-structural damage. Uncertain about building safety, patients were first moved outside, but the staff who stayed on, fearing the effects of the cold, soon moved patients back inside again.

The hospital had a one-week supply of emergency rations — and a water-purifying plant and storage tank — but no running water. Major medications were used up within a week. Six of eight regional pharmacies with medications stored nearby were evacuated. Local ambulance service ceased due to a shortage of gas, but patients were transported to the hospital from private cars and helicoptors fueled from outside the area.

Communication was challenging. Cell phone calls and texting were not an option. Fortunately, the hospital’s internal phone system worked, and so did iPads running on a separate, 3G network, Nimura said.

Many people were treated for hypothermia. Caregivers also treated patients whose lungs were exposed to contaminated water and who contracted infections, a condition called “tsunami lung.” The staff treated these patients with a slew of antibiotics in the hopes that one of them would prove to be effective treatment.

Many from outside the area were reluctant to transport needed supplies to the hospital. There was no help forthcoming from the government for two weeks, according to Nimura. Hospital workers broadcast urgent messages via YouTube and Twitter and soon were able to make appeals for help through interviews with news media. It was three months before the hospital was again operating close to its pre-earthquake capacity, Nimura said.

Of the estimated 19,000 who perished in the disaster, most died from drowning or hypothermia, not from the crushing injuries that are most prevalent after most major earthquakes, symposium speakers said.

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Molly Cooke appointed to fill new role at UCSF.

Molly Cooke, UC San Francisco

Molly Cooke, M.D., FACP, professor of medicine at UC San Francisco, has been appointed the first Global Health Sciences director of education.

Cooke, who will begin her transition to Global Health Sciences (GHS) in March, will officially step down from her role as the founding director of the Haile T. Debas Academy of Medical Educators in June.

A leading expert on medical education and educational research as well an acclaimed teacher, she has twice received the Kaiser Family Foundation Teaching Award as well as a UCSF Academic Senate Award for Distinction in Teaching. In 2006, she was awarded the AOA/Robert J. Glaser Distinguished Teacher Award by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC); in 2010, she received the Career Achievement Award in Education from the Society for General Internal Medicine.

“I am tremendously excited to be joining GHS,” said Cooke. “My very first medical experience, as a teenager, was in an isolated and completely underserved Inuit community in northern Labrador. I spent five months working in rural Guatemala before starting my medical internship. It will be a privilege to work with global health leaders on the UCSF campus and beyond, using education to address health inequities worldwide.”

“Dr. Cooke will make an excellent addition to the GHS team,” said GHS Executive Director Jaime Sepulveda in announcing the appointment on March 5. “We are very fortunate to be able to leverage her expertise and experience in medical education at UCSF. She will be an invaluable asset as we grow our global health education programs, building on the strong foundation already put in place by a small group of dedicated UCSF faculty.”

In the new GHS role, Cooke will bring a vision and direction to the development of innovative global health educational offerings, including degree and certificate programs, faculty development, distance education courses, and expansion of an inter-professional global health curriculum across UCSF’s schools. She will collaborate with Ziegler and Stewart as they continue directing their existing programs.

To read more about Cooke, go to the Global Health Sciences website.

UCLA engineers develop cost-effective cell-phone attachment that acts as fluorescent microscope.

Cell phone-based E. coli detector

FINDINGS:
Researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed a new cell phone–based fluorescent imaging and sensing platform that can detect the presence of the bacterium Escherichia coli in food and water. The engineers combined antibody functionalized glass capillaries with quantum dots (semiconductors often used for medical imaging) as signal reporters to specifically detect E. coli particles in liquid samples using a lightweight, compact attachment to an existing cell-phone camera.

Using battery-powered, inexpensive light-emitting diodes (LEDs), the researchers can excite/pump labeled E. coli particles captured on the capillary surface; there, emissions from the quantum dots can be imaged with the cell-phone camera, using an additional lens inserted between the capillary and the cell phone.

The cost-effective cell-phone attachment acts as a florescent microscope, quantifying the emitted light from each capillary after the specific capture of E. coli particles within a sample. By quantifying the florescent light emission from each tube, the concentration of E. coli in the sample can be determined.

IMPACT:
E. coli can easily contaminate food and drinking water. It poses a significant threat to public health, even in highly developed parts of the world, and causes a large number of hospitalizations and deaths every year. As few as 10–100 E. coli particles can kill the cells of the intestinal lining, destroy the kidneys and cause blood clots in the brain, as well as seizures, paralysis and respiratory failure.

This study illustrates the promising potential of a cell phone–enabled, field-portable and cost-effective E. coli detection platform for the screening of both water and food samples.

AUTHORS:
Authors of the research include UCLA electrical engineering postdoctoral scholar Hongying Zhu; UCLA electrical engineering undergraduate student Uzair Sikora; and UCLA associate professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering Aydogan Ozcan. Ozcan is also a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. More on Ozcan’s research group can be found at http://innovate.ee.ucla.edu.

FUNDING:
The Ozcan Research Group is funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Army Research Office.

JOURNAL:
The research is published in the peer-reviewed journal The Royal Society of Chemistry and is available online at http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2012/an/c2an35071h.

Intersection of interests “a really exciting opportunity.”

Paul Volberding, UC San Francisco

Paul Volberding, M.D., one of the world’s leading experts on treatment for patients infected with HIV, the AIDS virus, became the new director of the AIDS Research Institute (ARI) at UC San Francisco on Feb. 13.

On the same date Volberding also became the first to fill a newly created position as director of research for UCSF Global Health Sciences, a University of California organized research unit (ORU) based at UCSF.

In a long UCSF career, Volberding early on became one of the first to become dedicated to caring for patients with AIDS in San Francisco, and he was a leader in early clinical trials to evaluate antiretroviral therapy in HIV infection. He has served for many years on the two major guidelines panels for antiretroviral therapy, addressing controversial issues such as the optimal timing of treatment in early HIV infection when no symptoms are evident.

To take on his new responsibilities Volberding has stepped down as chief of medical service at the UCSF-affiliated San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center (SFVAMC) and as vice chair in the department of medicine. He will retain a clinical affiliation with the SFVAMC.

Volberding succeeds John Greenspan, M.D., as ARI director. In announcing the change, Sam Hawgood, M.B.B.S., dean of the UCSF School of Medicine, and Jaime Sepúlveda, M.D., M.P.H., Dr.Sc., executive director of UCSF Global Health Sciences, noted that Greenspan “superbly led the ARI for nine years.”

As ARI director Volberding now oversees the coordination and integration of all HIV/AIDS activities at UCSF. As director of research for Global Health Sciences, he is responsible for leading, coordinating, and integrating all of the ORU’s research activities.

Volberding will continue to serve as the co-director of the Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) at UCSF and the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology, and as director of global health for the UCSF Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI).

“The change allows me to devote time to what I have most loved to do academically throughout my career, and to try and increase the collaboration between two large communities,” Volberding said. “I see it as a really exciting opportunity. The nature of the HIV epidemic and research on HIV is increasingly global. There are excellent people doing work abroad in HIV, but also many people addressing other global public health issues.

“I look forward to working with Jaime Sepúlveda — whom I have known for many years — to see what these two communities can learn from one another, appreciating that there already is overlap between them.

“The challenge of working across many different sites is one that I have been accustomed to while working on HIV. The challenge now becomes bigger, but it is one that I think is manageable.”

Early in his UCSF career Volberding worked as a research fellow in the virology laboratory of Jay Levy, M.D., later a co-discoverer of HIV. At UCSF-affiliated San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH) Volberding established a groundbreaking model for AIDS patient care, research and professional education — the Positive Health Program — and served as director for 20 years.

In 2001, Volberding moved to the SFVAMC, which he refers to as a model for high-quality, comprehensive patient care and for excellent educational programs. As chair of the SFVAMC NCIRE board of directors, Volberding has been an advocate of sharing medical data across systems to further research.

“There is a very deeply engrained medical records system at the VA, and it has become a model for demonstrating how that kind of data base can be used for medical research,” he said. A recent study led by SFVAMC researchers that uncovered potential side effects of tenofovir treatment of HIV is a prime example, Volberding said.

Volberding is married to another UCSF faculty member, Molly Cooke, M.D., a professor of medicine and a leading medical educator at UCSF. Volberding and Cooke began battling HIV during the first days of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco three decades ago, before the nature of the infection was even understood. While attaining leadership roles at UCSF, they also have raised three children in the city, all of whom now are adults successfully pursuing non-medical careers.

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Campus joins with China-based genomic organization to form BGI@UC Davis partnership.

Ralph Hexter, UC Davis

The University of California, Davis, and China-based BGI, the world’s largest genomics organization, based in China, signed a master agreement today (Feb. 17) sealing a partnership that will change the landscape of genomic sciences in California and the Western states by establishing a joint facility called BGI@UC Davis. The alliance will foster critical breakthroughs in the areas of food security and human, animal and environmental health.

The master agreement was signed today by UC Davis Provost Ralph G. Hexter and Hao Zhang, co-director of BGI@UC Davis, at a morning ceremony in Los Angeles, with high-ranking dignitaries from China and the United States attending.

“Today marks an exciting new chapter in the collaboration between UC Davis, with our exceptional strengths in biology, medicine, food and the environment, and BGI, the world’s premier genomics organization,” said UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi. “The discoveries that flow from this partnership will have a worldwide impact.”

Under the agreement, UC Davis faculty and students will expand access to the capabilities and expertise of one of the world’s premier genomics and bioinformatics institutes, while BGI researchers will be able to access the university’s diverse resources and expertise in research, especially in biology, human and veterinary medicine, agriculture, the environment and education.

Jian Wang, president of BGI, stated, “We look forward to a highly productive relationship with UC Davis, one of the top research universities in the U.S., especially in the areas of agricultural, environmental and biological research. Given UC Davis’ expertise in these areas, coupled with BGI’s expertise in genome sequencing and bioinformatics, we expect this partnership and the establishment of BGI@UC Davis to lead to significant scientific breakthroughs.”

In June of 2011, Katehi and Wang signed the initial agreement to establish the BGI@UC Davis partnership during a meeting in Shenzhen, one of China’s Special Economic Zones.

This was followed by a second agreement signed in October 2011 that established an interim BGI facility for immediate use at the UC Davis School of Medicine in Sacramento and initiated planning for a permanent BGI@UC Davis facility. That signing ceremony, held in Sacramento for this second agreement, was attended by both Qin Xu, the mayor of Shenzhen, and Kevin Johnson, the mayor of Sacramento.

Under the October 2011 agreement, BGI has moved three state-of-the-art DNA sequencing machines into the interim facility on the UC Davis Sacramento campus. When complete, the facility will accommodate 20 such machines, dramatically increasing the DNA sequencing capacity readily available to campus researchers.

The partnership between BGI and UC Davis will provide new opportunities for researchers at both institutions, said Harris Lewin, vice chancellor for research at UC Davis. It will enable them to tackle bigger and more complex problems and assemble teams that can compete for bigger grants. It will also act as a catalyst to bring new companies and businesses to Sacramento, Lewin said.

The BGI@UC Davis facility will partner with the existing UC Davis Genome Center, located in the Genome and Biomedical Sciences Facility on the UC Davis campus, in the further development of genomics at UC Davis. The new BGI@UC Davis facility will dramatically increase the capacity for sequencing at UC Davis.

Genomics is a discipline of biology concerning the study of the genome, or all the genes of an organism. The field includes intensive efforts to determine the genomes of plants, animals, microbes and other living things, as a way to better understand how they grow, develop and function. Since the first human genome was completed in 2001, the genomes of many other plants and animals have been sequenced, including lab animals and plants, crops such as rice, and disease-causing microbes.

About BGI
BGI was founded in Beijing, China in 1999, with the mission of being a premier scientific partner to the global research community. The goal of BGI is to make leading-edge genomic science highly accessible through its investment in infrastructure that leverages the best available technology, economies of scale and expert bioinformatics resources. BGI and its affiliates, BGI Americas, based in Cambridge, Mass., and BGI Europe, based in Copenhagen, Denmark, have established partnerships and collaborations with leading academic and government research institutions as well as global biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, supporting a variety of disease, agricultural, environmental and related applications. BGI has established a proven track record of excellence, delivering results with high efficiency and accuracy for innovative, high profile research, which has generated more than 170 publications in top-tier journals such as Nature and Science. These accomplishment include sequencing one percent of the human genome for the International Human Genome Project, contributing 10 percent to the international Human HapMap Project, carrying out research to combat SARS and deadly German E. coli, playing a key role in the Sino-British Chicken Genome Project, and completing the sequence of the rice genome, the silkworm genome, the first Asian diploid genome, the potato genome and, most recently, 1,000 genomes and human gut metagenome. For more information about BGI, please visit www.genomics.cn and www.bgiamericas.com.

About UC Davis
For more than 100 years, UC Davis has engaged in teaching, research and public service that matter to California and transform the world. Located close to the state capital, UC Davis has more than 32,000 students, more than 2,500 faculty and more than 21,000 staff, an annual research budget that exceeds $684 million, a comprehensive health system and 13 specialized research centers. The university offers interdisciplinary graduate study and more than 100 undergraduate majors in four colleges — Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Biological Sciences, Engineering, and Letters and Science. It also houses six professional schools — Education, Law, Management, Medicine, Veterinary Medicine and the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing.

Outbreaks of communicable disease pose major threat to endangered African primates.

Infectious disease has joined poaching and habitat loss as a major threat to the survival of African great apes as they have become restricted to ever-smaller populations. Despite the work of dedicated conservationists, efforts to save our closest living relatives from ecological extinction are largely failing, and new scientific approaches are necessary to analyze major threats and find innovative solutions.

In response to this crisis, researchers at UC Santa Barbara‘s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) have conducted a pioneering study that illustrates how severely disease threatens the long-term survival of wild gorillas and chimpanzees. It also explores the status of potential interventions that may help ensure their continued existence. The article, “Consequences of Non-Intervention for Infectious Disease in African Great Apes,” was recently published in the online journal PLoS ONE. The study indicates that mortality rates comparable to those recently reported for disease outbreaks in wild populations are not sustainable.

Sadie Ryan, the lead author, is assistant professor of ecology at SUNY-ESF in Syracuse, N.Y.; and Walsh is a quantitative ecologist at the University of Cambridge, England.

Modeling demonstrated that recovery times to current population levels from a single disease outbreak, under very optimistic rates of recovery, would range from five years for a flu-like outbreak, to 131 years for an Ebola virus outbreak that killed 96 percent of the population, according to the study. Population resilience is central to assessing disease threat because gorillas and chimpanzees reproduce more slowly than virtually any other animal on earth, including humans.

“These disease mortality rates are particularly troubling, given the rising pathogen risk due to increasing human contact with wild apes, associated with their habituation for tourism, poaching and the increase in population pressure around protected areas,” said Ryan. “These small populations of great apes are the last vestiges of our closest relatives, so there is a huge emotional response when it comes to the question of intervention. Should we or can we wait, or should we use proactive intervention by vaccinating ahead of time?”

Both “naturally” occurring pathogens, such as Ebola and Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV), and respiratory pathogens transmitted from humans, such as the common cold and flu viruses, have been confirmed as important sources of mortality in wild gorillas and chimpanzees, and the rate of pathogen spillover from humans to African apes is known to be increasing. Although awareness of the threat has spread throughout the scientific community, interventions such as vaccination and treatment remain very controversial, the researchers noted.

Because of the scarcity of diagnostic data on exactly which pathogens infect apes and at what rates, Ryan and Walsh found it difficult to rigorously quantify how increased tourism would translate into increased disease pressure on ape populations. As a result, they assessed and compared potential future disease spillover risk – in terms of vaccination rates among humans that may come into contact with wild apes, and the availability of vaccines against potentially threatening diseases – with non-interventionist responses, such as limiting tourist access to the primates, community health programs, increased vigilance and reactive veterinary intervention.

Based on their findings, Ryan and Walsh suggest that the great ape conservation community “pursue and promote treatment and vaccination as weapons in the arsenal for fighting the decline of African apes.” They recommend that field studies on safe and efficient methods for delivering treatments and vaccines orally be conducted, along with evaluating the cost-effectiveness of all ape conservation strategies.

“We looked at the rates of vaccination in human populations both in host countries and potential tourists, and at the potential vaccines in development that could be used for great apes,” Ryan said. “But we need to do more research when outbreaks occur by mobilizing the entire research community in order to better understand what is going on.”

To view the paper, visit: www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0029030

Analysis of Kenya study shows simultaneously confronting AIDS, malaria and waterborne illness improves health.

A volunteer in 2008 shows people from the Lurambi District in Western Kenya how to use incecticide-treated bednets to prevent the spread of malaria

The great paradox of global health efforts is that regions of the world most plagued by poverty, poor infrastructure and rampant disease are often the most difficult to support. Now, scientists have demonstrated that confronting several diseases at once can make the most of thinly-stretched donor dollars and national health care budgets, to help to save lives.

A new analysis published this week in the open-access journal PLoS ONE (Feb. 3) focused on a combined public health campaign in Western Province, Kenya led by the Swiss-based company Vestergaard Frandsen, the Kenyan Ministry of Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The analysis looked at the cost effectiveness of simultaneously confronting the problems of HIV/AIDS, malaria and diarrhea caused by waterborne pathogens.

The researchers used the results of the campaign to build an analysis of the impact such efforts could have if carried out more broadly. The analysis found that for every 1,000 people reached through such campaigns, some $16,015 in health care costs would be avoided and more than 16 lives would be saved. As a result, local populations would gain hundreds of years of healthy life. The cost would be $32 per person, but averted health care costs would be greater, leading to the net savings.

“That’s a very attractive deal,” said James G. Kahn, M.D., M.P.H., a professor of health policy, epidemiology and global health at the University of California, San Francisco, who is the senior author on the PLoS ONE study and led the economic aspect of the research. “This kind of a campaign is an excellent use of global health dollars.”

Health care workers distributed “CarePacks” at 37 locations in Kenya over seven days in 2008. These packs contained insecticide-treated bed nets to reduce the spread of malaria, water filters for preventing diarrheal diseases, and condoms.

Some 47,000 people ultimately received the packs, which also contained educational information as incentive for local residents to participate in a voluntary HIV testing and counseling program.

By combining efforts to reduce the burdens of malaria, diarrhea and HIV/AIDS, the program efficiently stretched the impact of its funds, Kahn said, which is important in areas where per capita health expenditures may amount to little more than a few dollars a year. Combining these public health efforts into one program also saved a great deal of time, he added.

“This program was implemented in seven days, reaching 80 percent of the local population,” Kahn said. “This rapid implementation means more health benefits were quickly achieved.”

Other co-authors of the article, “Integrated HIV Testing, Malaria, and Diarrhea Prevention Campaign in Kenya: Modeled Health Impact and Cost-effectiveness” are N. Muraguri, B. Harris, E. Lugada, T. Clasen, M. Grabowsky, J. Mermin and S. Shariff.

Kahn is based in the UCSF Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies, the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and Global Health Sciences.

In addition to UCSF, authors on this study are affiliated with the Kenyan Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation, CHF International, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, the ESP/UN Foundation, and the CDC.

The analysis was funded by the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse and by the company Vestergard Frandsen, which managed the campaign and manufactured the water filters and bed nets distributed.

UCSF is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care.

UC Davis pathology resident provides health care to Kenyans.

Kali Tu, UC Davis

Third-year pathology resident Kali Tu is focused on making a difference to improve health. She recently participated in a two-week elective residency training rotation in Malindi, Kenya, where she provided medical care to approximately 400 rural residents with little or no access to health-care services.

Malindi is a coastal town located on the Indian Ocean about halfway between Mombasa and Somalia In Africa. A two-hour flight from Nairobi, Malindi and the surrounding region have a population of about 200,000 residents.

The trip to Malindi was the second for Tu, who joined a team of 26 American physicians, nurses, anesthesiologists, and medical and high-school students. The trip was organized by Vanderbilt University ear, nose and throat surgeons and the Caris Foundation, a Texas nonprofit group that arranges medical care for treatable conditions for individuals in developing nations. The foundation worked with the two main hospitals in Malindi —  Tawfiq, a Muslim-mission hospital, and the public hospital, called the District Hospital — and invited local residents with visible head, neck and facial disorders for evaluation and treatment by the team.

During the trip, surgeons operated on more than 200 patients, and Tu traveled between both hospitals on a daily basis as needed to examine patients and diagnose tumors and margins. The experience broadened her horizons, advanced her training and exposed her to another culture and health-care system.

“The experience was an incredible educational opportunity,” said Tu, who joined the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine‘s residency training program in 2010 in her second year of training. “I gained a lot of experience in performing fine-needle aspirations, assessing cell specimens and communicating with other physicians. It was extremely fulfilling to work directly with patients and surgeons in an area with low resources.”

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Prominent speakers to discuss population growth and global health Feb. 4.

More than 300 people — many of them University of California faculty, students and staff — will gather at UC Berkeley on Saturday, Feb. 4, for the second UC Global Health Day, sponsored by the UC Global Health Institute (UCGHI). The conference will be both a discussion about population growth and its impact on health worldwide, and a showcase for global health research being undertaken by graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty across the 10-campus system.

The conference, from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. in Dwinelle Hall, will be hosted in partnership with the UC Berkeley Center for Global Public Health, the UC Berkeley Bixby Center for Population, Health & Sustainability, and the Northern California International Health Interest Group.

Two special sessions will take place in the morning with prominent speakers from the U.S. and abroad. The first session, Population, Consumption and Human Wellbeing, will be chaired by UC Berkeley’s Malcolm Potts, director and founder of the Bixby Center for Population, Health & Sustainability. The session will feature keynote speaker Sir John E. Sulston, the 2002 Nobel laureate in medicine. He chairs the People and the Planet Working Group of the Royal Society, London. Potts and Eliya Msiyaphazi Zulu, the second keynote speaker, also are participants in the working group.

“The freedom and autonomy of women, the challenge of reducing maternal and infant mortality around the world, lifting 2 billion people out of abject poverty, forestalling more failed states like Somalia, and adapting to global warming are all heavily influenced by the population growth factor,” said Potts. “Whether women are given the right to decide when to have a child is critical to health as well as education and development.”

A second morning session, titled Consequences of High Fertility and Population Growth: The Special Case of Africa, will be chaired by UC Berkeley’s Martha Campbell, lecturer in global health, School of Public Health. The keynote speaker will be Zulu, director of the African Institute for Development Policy in Nairobi, Kenya. Both morning sessions also will feature prominent scientists from several UC campuses.

“The future of many African nations hinges on the policies that African governments develop and the investment the international community is prepared to make around voluntary family planning,” said Campbell.

In the afternoon, more than 70 UC students, faculty and other practitioners in global health will make oral presentations and lead breakout sessions, and 78 posters will be presented. A range of global health issues will be offered, including: Global Public Health Law; Global Health & the Media; Gender-based Violence in sub-Saharan Africa: Toward a Transdisciplinary Approach; Social Media How-To; From Malaria Control to Elimination; Improved Childhood Health through Reduction of Household Air Pollution from Cookstoves; and Climate Change & Vector Biology.

“Students and young faculty are the main drivers behind the incredible growth in global health research and education programs on UC campuses,” says Haile Debas, director of the UC Global Health Institute and former chancellor and dean of the School of Medicine at UCSF. “UC Global Health Day provides a forum to share their research and ignite collaborations that could lead to innovations in addressing major health problems in developing countries.”

The UC Global Health Institute was established in November 2009 in response to the growing demand from students and faculty interested in global health research and education. The UCGHI is composed of three multicampus Centers of Expertise — Migration & Health; One Health; and Women’s Health & Empowerment – that are launching projects and education and training programs to produce leaders and practitioners of global health, conduct innovative research, and develop international partnerships to improve the health of vulnerable people and communities in California and worldwide. Currently, the UCGHI is assessing the feasibility of creating a joint MS program in global health at three or more UC campuses.

The UCGHI is jointly led by Debas at UCSF and Thomas Coates, the Michael and Sue Steinberg Professor of Global AIDS Research at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine.

The registration deadline for UC Global Health Day is Jan. 27. The cost to attend is $25 for students, $50 for general admission and $75 for exhibitors. For more information, visit the UCGHI website.

Media contact:
Paula Murphy, Director of Communications, UCGHI
(415) 597-8240 (office); (415) 999-7241 (cell)
murphyp2@globalhealth.ucsf.edu

Turns cell phone into powerful microscope.

A groundbreaking imaging technology developed by UCLA engineering professor Aydogan Ozcan that can turn a simple cell phone into a powerful microscope has been named the top innovation of 2011 by The Scientist, a magazine focusing on the life sciences, research and technology. Ozcan’s compact, lightweight and inexpensive microscope has the potential to bring better health care and monitoring to impoverished and underserved areas of the globe.

The technology, known as LUCAS (Ultra–wide-field Cell monitoring Array platform based on Shadow imaging), was ranked No. 1 among a field of more than 65 entries judged by the magazine as part of its annual “Top 10 Innovations” contest. Other winners in the top 10 included a new high-powered DNA sequencer, a mini-MRI system, a watch-like device that measures the body’s circadian rhythm, and a first-of-its-kind 360-degree optical imager.

Ozcan’s LUCAS is an easy-to-use, pocket-sized holographic microscope that weighs less than 50 grams, uses off-the-shelf parts and costs as little as $10. It can be attached to a cell phone’s camera, and blood and saliva samples can then be loaded onto chips that slide into the side of the microscope. The technology can be used to monitor diseases like HIV and malaria and to test water quality in the field after a major disaster.

Algorithms developed by Ozcan’s research group instantly identify and count red and white blood cells and microparticles in the fluid samples, a time-consuming process typically performed by trained technicians. The image results can be sent by the cell phone to centralized hospitals for analysis by health care professionals.

“We have more than 5 billion cell phone subscribers around the world today, and because of this, cell phones can now play a central role in telemedicine applications,” said Ozcan, an associate professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering at UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. “Our research group has already created a very nice set of tools that can potentially replace most of the advanced instruments used currently in laboratories.”

Ozcan has garnered a great deal of media attention and professional recognition in recent years for his work on lensless computational microscopy. He’s been honored with a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award, and Office of Naval Research and Army Research Office Young Investigator awards, among others.

The lensless imaging platform behind the cell phone microscope is already undergoing real-world trials. Field tests of the cell phone microscope began in Africa last summer using funds received from three major awards. Next year, Karin Nielsen, an infectious diseases pediatrician at UCLA, will take the portable microscope into the fields of the Amazon to test its ability to diagnose malaria, anemia, low white blood-cell count and intestinal parasites.

For more on Ozcan’s research, visit http://innovate.ee.ucla.edu.

Partnership will cover telehealth, scientific and technical development, and neurodevelopmental disorders.

Sergio Aguilar-Gaxiola, UC Davis

UC Davis Health System has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the state of Sinaloa, Mexico, to partner to improve the health and well-being of its residents through the exchange of ideas, data and research on telehealth, scientific and technical development, and neurodevelopmental disorders.

Sinaloa has partnered with UC Davis because of the health system’s internationally recognized leadership in telehealth technology and neurodevelopmental research, said Sergio Aguilar-Gaxiola, who directs the UC Davis Center for Reducing Health Disparities and community engagement for the UC Davis Clinical and Translational Science Center.

Approximately 27 percent of Sinaloa’s population lives in rural settings. The government and secretariat of health of Sinaloa have pledged to strengthen the state’s health infrastructure and to increase access to quality health care using telehealth technology, particularly for populations residing in remote rural areas.

“The government of Sinaloa is interested in creating the infrastructure to support telemedicine and telehealth services to significantly improve access to primary-care services for its nearly 3 million residents,” said Aguilar-Gaxiola, a professor of clinical internal medicine.

“They also would like UC Davis to share its expertise in autism and fragile X syndrome with Mexican health professionals and families to improve early identification, diagnosis and treatment,” Aguilar-Gaxiola said. “A third goal is to foster scientific and technical development to support health education primarily aimed at primary-care settings.”

UC Davis is a national leader in extending access to health-care services to rural and underserved areas through telehealth. The UC Davis Center for Health and Technology uses high-speed data lines linked to video units to connect large, urban medical centers with community hospitals and clinics. The technology allows specialists and subspecialists to consult with community physicians and their patients via live, interactive videoconferencing.

Similarly, the UC Davis MIND Institute is internationally known for its leading-edge research into neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism spectrum disorders and fragile X syndrome. The institute’s world renowned scientists engage in research to find improved treatments, as well as  causes and cures, for autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), fragile X syndrome, Tourette syndrome and other neurodevelopmental conditions.

The MOU with Sinaloa is the most recent affiliation between UC Davis Health System and a Mexican entity.

Earlier this year, health system leaders traveled to Mexico City to forge a similar MOU with the Instituto Carlos Slim de la Salud (the Carlos Slim Health Institute), A.C. That agreement is focused on raising awareness of mental-health issues and sharing useful and innovative information to enable the early identification of autism and fragile X syndrome. Founded in 2007, the institute promotes research, develops initiatives and funds projects to address health challenges that affect Mexico and the broader Latin American region.

And in 2010, UC Davis Health System partnered with Shriners Hospital for Children — Northern California and the Mexican Health Ministry to establish a burn fellowship program for physicians from Mexico. The 12-month fellowship program trains two physicians each year in resuscitation and burn-care management, reconstructive surgery and clinical research.

UC Davis Health System is improving lives and transforming health care by providing excellent patient care, conducting groundbreaking research, fostering innovative, interprofessional education, and creating dynamic, productive partnerships with the community. The academic health system includes one of the country’s best medical schools, a 631-bed acute-care teaching hospital, an 800-member physician’s practice group and the new Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing. It is home to a National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center, an international neurodevelopmental institute, a stem cell institute and a comprehensive children’s hospital. Other nationally prominent centers focus on advancing telemedicine, improving vascular care, eliminating health disparities and translating research findings into new treatments for patients. Together, they make UC Davis a hub of innovation that is transforming health for all. For more information, visit healthsystem.ucdavis.edu.

Interaction between immune response and later infection can mean difference between mild fever and death.

Researchers collecting samples from local children, monitored by Eva Harris (right), as part of the UC Berkeley/Sustainable Sciences Institute Pediatric Dengue Cohort Study in Managua, Nicaragua.

One of the most vexing challenges in the battle against dengue virus, a mosquito-borne virus responsible for 50-100 million infections every year, is that getting infected once can put people at greater risk for a more severe infection down the road.

Now, for the first time, an international team of researchers that includes experts from the University of California, Berkeley, has pulled apart the mechanism behind changing dengue virus genetics and dynamics of host immunity, and they are reporting their findings in today’s (Dec. 21) issue of Science Translational Medicine.

The virus that causes dengue disease is divided into four closely related serotypes (dengue virus 1, 2, 3 and 4), and those serotypes can be further divided into genetic variants, or subtypes.

The researchers showed that a person’s prior immune response to one serotype of dengue virus could influence the interaction with virus subtypes in a subsequent infection. How that interaction plays out could mean the difference between getting a mild fever and going into a fatal circulatory failure from dengue hemorrhagic fever or dengue shock syndrome.

The findings have implications for the efforts to combat a disease that has grown dramatically in recent decades, including the development of a first-ever dengue vaccine.

According to the World Health Organization, dengue disease is now endemic in more than 100 countries around the world, and recent estimates say some 3 billion people — almost half of the world’s population — are at risk.

It was already known that upon a person’s first infection with dengue virus, the immune system reacts normally by creating antibodies to fight the viral invaders. The problem is that those antibodies can then be confused if confronted later with one of the other three types of dengue virus and, as this new study revealed, even different subtypes within the same serotype.

“With the second infection, the antibodies sort of recognize the new type of viruses, but not well enough to clear them from the system,” said study lead author Molly OhAinle, postdoctoral fellow in infectious diseases at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. “Instead of neutralizing the viruses, the antibodies bind to them in a way that actually helps them invade the immune system’s other cells and spread.”

The study authors noted that this Trojan horse effect has been shown before, but the new research provides an analysis of the interplay between viral genetics and immune response with unprecedented detail, going beyond the main serotype.

Putting the puzzle pieces together required UC Berkeley’s expertise in immunology and virology, the genome analysis and biostatistical capabilities at the Broad Institute of Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the epidemiological and clinical field work at Nicaragua’s National Virology Laboratory.

Researchers used data from two independent, Nicaragua-based studies headed by Eva Harris, professor of infectious diseases and vaccinology and director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Global Public Health, and Dr. Angel Balmaseda, director of the National Virology Laboratory in Nicaragua. One was a hospital-based study that examined children admitted to the National Pediatric Reference hospital with dengue between 2005 and 2009. The other was a prospective study that had followed 3,800 children since 2004, with blood samples collected annually.

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