The Zika Crisis Latest Findings - Harvard Forum March 4

[niman]

The Zika Crisis
Latest Findings

 

https://theforum.sph.harvard.edu/events/the-zika-crisis/

 

Edited March 4, 2016 by niman

[niman]

Summary

Watch the live webcast here on Friday, March 4, 2016
12:30-1:30pm ET

THE ZIKA CRISIS: Latest Findings
Presented in Collaboration with Reuters
The ongoing spread of the Zika virus — and its unconfirmed potential links to a birth defect called microcephaly — have raised worldwide alarms. This Forum will examine what we know and don’t know about the virus, drawing parallels and lessons from another disease outbreak, Ebola, that we can apply to the Zika emergency. An expert panel will discuss the current status of our understanding of the Zika virus and its health effects; containment strategies, including controlling the mosquitoes that primarily spread the virus; and feasibility of a vaccine and treatment options.

Spread the word:
Send our panelists questions in advance to [email protected]
A live chat on The Forum’s Zika Crisis web page.
Tweet us @ForumHSPH #zika

Part of: Policy Controversies.

Presented in Collaboration with Reuters

[niman]

Julie Steenhuysen

Julie Steenhuysen is a Health and Science Correspondent for Reuters.

•  

[niman]

Anthony Fauci

Anthony Fauci was a panelist for the Forum discussion on Ebola.

Anthony Fauci was appointed Director of NIAID in 1984. He oversees an extensive research portfolio of basic and applied research to prevent, diagnose, and treat infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections, influenza, tuberculosis, malaria and illness from potential agents of bioterrorism. NIAID also supports research on transplantation and immune-related illnesses, including autoimmune disorders, asthma and allergies. The NIAID budget for fiscal year 2013 was approximately $4.5 billion. Dr. Fauci serves as one of the key advisors to the White House and Department of Health and Human Services on global AIDS issues, and on initiatives to bolster medical and public health preparedness against emerging infectious disease threats such as pandemic influenza. He was one of the principal architects of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which has already been responsible for saving millions of lives throughout the developing world.

Dr. Fauci also is the long-time chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation. He has made many contributions to basic and clinical research on the pathogenesis and treatment of immune-mediated and infectious diseases. He helped pioneer the field of human immunoregulation by making important basic scientific observations that underpin the current understanding of the regulation of the human immune response. In addition, Dr. Fauci is widely recognized for delineating the precise mechanisms whereby immunosuppressive agents modulate the human immune response. He developed effective therapies for formerly fatal inflammatory and immune-mediated diseases such as polyarteritis nodosa, granulomatosis with polyangiitis (formerly Wegener’s granulomatosis), and lymphomatoid granulomatosis. A 1985 Stanford University Arthritis Center Survey of the American Rheumatism Association membership ranked the work of Dr. Fauci on the treatment of polyarteritis nodosa and granulomatosis with polyangiitis as one of the most important advances in patient management in rheumatology over the previous 20 years.

Dr. Fauci has made seminal contributions to the understanding of how HIV destroys the body’s defenses leading to its susceptibility to deadly infections. Further, he has been instrumental in developing highly effective strategies for the therapy of patients living with HIV/AIDS, as well as for a vaccine to prevent HIV infection. He continues to devote much of his research time to identifying the nature of the immunopathogenic mechanisms of HIV infection and the scope of the body’s immune responses to HIV.

In 2003, an Institute for Scientific Information study indicated that in the 20-year period from 1983 to 2002, Dr. Fauci was the 13th most-cited scientist among the 2.5 to 3 million authors in all disciplines throughout the world who published articles in scientific journals during that time frame. Dr. Fauci was the world’s 10th most-cited HIV/AIDS researcher in the period from 1996 through 2006.

Dr. Fauci has delivered major lectures all over the world and is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Science, the George M. Kober Medal of the Association of American Physicians, the Mary Woodard Lasker Award for Public Service, the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research, the Robert Koch Gold Medal, the Prince Mahidol Award, and 38 honorary doctoral degrees from universities in the United States and abroad.

Dr. Fauci is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Philosophical Society, as well as other professional societies including the American College of Physicians, The American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, The American Association of Immunologists, and the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology. He serves on the editorial boards of many scientific journals; as an editor of Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine; and as author, coauthor, or editor of more than 1,200 scientific publications, including several textbooks.

[niman]

Hon. Nils Daulaire, M.D.

Dr. Nils Daulaire served in the Obama Administration as Assistant Secretary for Global Affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and as the United States Representative on the Executive Board of the World Health Organization, as well as Alternate U.S. Board Member to the Global Fund. Earlier, he served in the Clinton Administration as Deputy Assistant Administrator for Policy at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

For over a decade, Dr. Daulaire was president and CEO of the Global Health Council, which led policy and advocacy efforts to improve maternal and child health, reproductive health and family planning, HIV/AIDS and infectious disease control in the poorest populations around the world. Earlier in his career, Dr. Daulaire worked for the John Snow Public Health Group, much of the time resident in Nepal where he conducted groundbreaking field research on community-based management of childhood pneumonia and vitamin A deficiency.

He comes to Harvard following a year as Senior Visiting Scholar on Global Health Security at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and previously was a clinical professor of global health at the University of Washington and visiting professor of community and family medicine at Dartmouth Medical School. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine as well as the Council on Foreign Relations. Dr. Daulaire has worked with over 50 countries around the globe and speaks seven languages.

[niman]

Ashish Jha

Dr Jha was a panelist in the Forum’s discussion on Telehealth.

Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH is a practicing general internist at the VA. He is a professor of Health Policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a member of the Institute of Medicine. His work has focused on four primary areas:

• Public reporting,
• Pay for performance,
• Health information technology,
• Leadership,

And the roles they play in effecting the delivery of safe, effective, patient-centered care. With a strong body of analytic work on the US system, he also founded the HSPH Initiative on Global Health Quality (HIGHQ), played a key role in the WHO’s working group on patient safety research, and is leading an international HIT benchmarking effort with the OECD.

[niman]

Marcia Castro

Marcia Castro is a founding member of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital’s Scientific Advisory Board. At Harvard, Castro serves as a member of the Faculty Advisory Committee of the Brazil Studies Program, a member of the Brazil Studies Program Steering Group of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS), and a member of the Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA) Steering Committee. Her research focuses on:

• the identification of social, biological, and environmental risks associated with vector-borne diseases in the tropics
• modeling determinants of malaria transmission, with particular emphasis on generating evidence for better control strategies
• expansion of the Brazilian Amazon frontier and the social and environmental impacts of large-scale development projects implemented in the region
• urbanization and health
• use of spatial analysis in the Social Sciences
• population dynamics and mortality models

Castro has applied geographical information systems, remote sensing, and spatial statistics to her research, as well as proposed novel methods in spatial analysis. She has done extensive work in the Brazilian Amazon, and has experience working in Africa. Since 2004, she has been working on the Dar es Salaam Urban Malaria Control Program, promoting the use of environmental management approaches to improve urban health. She is currently working on a project that is measuring health, poverty and place by modeling inequalities in Accra, Ghana using RS and GIS. She is also investigating the use of remotely sensed imagery to predict urban malaria in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Castro is leading a project to assess the malaria poverty vicious cycle, and she started a project to propose a new methodology to assess spatio-temporal trends in a scenario of multiple control interventions. She is also working on the issues of human mobility and asymptomatic malaria infections in the Brazilian Amazon, as well as on the potential impacts of extreme climatic events on malaria transmission in the Amazon.