Global Pediatrics Blog

Chandy John Interviewed for ASTMH Blog

By fandrey on May 23, 2013 10:53 AM

Chandy John, M.D., M.S.

An interview with Global Pediatrics division director, Chandy John, appeared in a May 15 post on the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene blog. From the interview:

Q: Given your background in pediatrics and malaria, what were you thinking about on World Malaria Day?

A: I was thinking about how remarkable it is that there IS a World Malaria Day. I got into malaria work because I saw kids dying of malaria in Bangladesh, Nigeria and Laos as a medical student and resident, and yet there were very few people doing malaria research in the United States at the time, particularly in my area of training (pediatrics). That has really changed, and it's not just physicians... continue reading

Dr. John is an active member of the ASTMH and chairs the Kean Fellowship Committee, which selects medical students to receive fellowships that support clinical or research electives in tropical medicine.

Read the full interview here

Honors Mentor Connection Scholar Completes Rotation With Global Pediatrics

By fandrey on May 13, 2013 1:35 PM

Katherine Matthews and Judith Eckerle

Minnetonka high school student, Katherine Matthews, completed a six-month internship experience with Judith Eckerle, MD, as part of her school district's Honors Mentor Connection program. Katherine explains:

With Dr. Eckerle's guidance I gathered data, wrote, and created a poster for my research paper titled, "Health of Children Considered for Adoption from China". I meticulously combed through deidentified medical records of 105 patients who have been seen in the International Adoption Clinic. I recorded each child's age, sex, birth weight, and whether or not they had special needs (long-term health issues). From there, the data was statistically analyzed to provide percentages of incidence of each of these groups of health issues.

We now can answer parents' and social workers' questions about what they might expect to see medically from children adopted from China, and how many children usually have a certain condition.

In order to keep track of the complex vocabulary used in what I was researching, I made an appendix of over 55 medical terms unique to the referrals that the Adoption Clinic usually sees from China. This list will be available as a reference for residents to use during their time at the IAC and is complete with case numbers and additional references for further information if necessary.

View Katherine's poster here

Says Katherine of her experience, "I'm very lucky to have had Dr. Eckerle as my mentor for this program; she's been a wonderful influence and a real inspiration for me."

Hamre Awarded 2013-14 Fogarty Fellowship

By fandrey on May 8, 2013 11:54 AM

Karen Elaine Stella Hamre, MPH
Current course of study: Doctor of Philosophy in Epidemiology, University of Minnesota School of Public Health

Congratulations to Karen Hamre, who has been awarded a Fogarty fellowship for 2013-14. Learn more about her project and goals, in her own words:

Highland areas (>1,500m above sea level) are targeted for malaria elimination due to their unstable transmission patterns. Unlike in malaria holoendemic regions where partial immunities to malaria are built-up and sustained through years of infectious mosquito bites, populations in highland areas are susceptible to epidemics as their immune responses wane due to the highly seasonal and sporadic nature of transmission.

Dr. Chandy John and his colleagues at the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI), Dr. John Vulule and Dr. George Ayodo, have been conducting research in the highland areas of Kipsamoite and Kapsisiywa in western Kenya for over a decade.

Through his active and passive surveillance studies, he reported evidence of local malaria transmission interruption from April 2007-March 2008 after the Kenyan Ministry of Health implemented annual indoor residual spraying and switched to first-line artemisinin-combination therapy anti-malarial drugs for treatment of uncomplicated malaria.

Interrupting local transmission is the first step towards the elimination stage.

During my 11 months in Kisumu, Kenya, as a Fogarty Global Health Scholar, I plan to utilize the rich data Dr. John is collecting on anthropogenic (e.g., roof structure, wall material, bednet usage, numbers in household), demographic (e.g., age, gender), entomologic (e.g., vector density and species), environmental (e.g., rainfall and temperature), and spatial (e.g., global positioning information of households, schools, forests, swamps) factors to study the epidemiology of malaria across time and transmission patterns in the same study population and location.

I intend to contribute to the understanding of the epidemiology of malaria in this highland area by making comparisons of predictors of malaria risk before and after interruption of transmission.

Specifically, I aim to determine where clustering of incidence occurs (i.e., identify 'hot spots' of malaria) after the period of interruption, and evaluate whether these clusters and related predicting ecologic risk factors correlate with those reported during epidemic and non-epidemic months before interruption.

Understanding how malaria interruption may affect several predictors of risk in highland settings will help inform future targeted control and elimination strategies.

For more information on the Fogarty fellowships, visit the Global Peds website

2013 Maastricht University Research Intern Arrives In Minneapolis

By fandrey on May 6, 2013 8:46 AM

Liza Toemen in South Africa in 2012, where she was completing a clinical clerkship in gynaecology & obstetrics. In the background are penguins on Boulders Beach, Simonstown.

For the past 4 years, Global Pediatrics faculty, Maria Kroupina, has provided research mentorship to physicians in training from Maastricht University, Netherlands. Today's entry is a guest post from our 2013 research intern, Liza Toemen. In her words:

"My name is Liza Toemen, I'm a final year medical student from Maastricht University, The Netherlands. I was born in Oirschot, a town near Eindhoven in the south of the Netherlands. A long time ago I decided I wanted to become a doctor, and luckily for me things went as I had dreamed.

"I went off to Maastricht to study, a place at the most southern point of the country.

Taking care of children at a children's institution in Mfulene, South Africa

"During my medical bachelor years I had the opportunity to do some volunteering with Aviva, a South-African organization. I spend 4 weeks working in a children's home in Mfulene, one of Cape Town's townships. We took care of about 30 children, mostly playing with but also bathing, feeding and preparing food for these children, some of whom had no permanent foster or adoptive family to go home to. Afterwards I went traveling in South Africa. I liked this so much that I grabbed every opportunity during my masters years to go abroad.

"My first internship was an elective of 10 weeks, which I decided to do in paediatrics in Mulago Hospital; Kampala, Uganda. During my stay I also visited a hospital in Gulu, in the north of Uganda, a very impressive experience, since it was my first practical experience in the hospital.

"After this internship my normal internships at all the different hospital specializations started. Most of those I did in the Netherlands, but I did ophthalmology in Belgium and gynaecology and obstetrics in Cape Town (yes, again Cape Town, you can never see too much of South Africa!)

"In the Dutch medical curriculum you do 3 bachelor years, mainly theory and 3 master years, mainly practical. The last year of the masters degree consists of 18 weeks' clinical internship and 18 weeks of research.

"I've just finished the clinical part in March--18 weeks on a general pediatric ward of a middle-sized hospital. The research part is why I have come to the University of Minnesota.

"I'll be doing 18 weeks of research at the U of M and helping Dr. Kroupina in the Development and Transition Clinic. I'm assisting with data analysis on her Kazakhstan study and will also write a paper. Later, I will also spend time on the growth study.

"My goals I'll finish halfway August and when I get home a couple weeks after that I hope to be able to call myself a MD."

2nd Annual Tiny Tim & Friends Craft Sale Coming Up!

By fandrey on April 30, 2013 10:19 AM

One of our international partners, Tiny Tim and Friends, will hold its 2nd annual craft sale on Thursday, May 2, 10am-2pm, on the 2nd floor Moos-PWB concourse across from Outside In Restaurant,. They will have Zambian crafts, including jewelry, hand-painted note cards, plastic tote bags and more.

Tiny Tim and Friends is a non-religious NGO that operates in Lusaka, Zambia, primarily in service of children with HIV. Program director, Tim Meade MD, provides an exemplary learning experience for our residents who elect to serve in Zambia during their internationanl electlve. Learn more

Eckerle Publishes On Vision and Hearing In International Adoptees

By fandrey on April 29, 2013 1:30 PM

Global Pediatrics faculty, Judy Eckerle, published in the April issue of Maternal Child Health: "Vision and Hearing Deficits and Associations With Parent-Reported Behavioral and Developmental Problems In International Adoptees". Dana Johnson was a co-author.

Global Child Health Educators Poster at APPD 2013

By fandrey on April 24, 2013 9:11 AM

L to R: Chuck Schubert (Cincinnati Children's Hospital), Nicole St. Clair (Medical College of Wisconsin), Cindy Howard (University of Minnesota), Jacquelyn Kuzminski (MCW), Sabrina Butteris (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Laura Houser (UW-Madison)

In April 2013, Cindy Howard and colleagues presented a poster: Global Child Health Educators: Local Collaboration To Optimize Global Education at the 2013 annual meeting of Association of Pediatric Program Directors (APPD).

The poster described the planning, organization and scholarly products that have resulted from our collaborative efforts as part of the Midwest Consortium of Global Health Educators. Formed in 2009, the Consortium brought together global health education programs with residency tracks from:

Cincinnati Children's Hospital
May Clinic College of Medicine
Medical College of Wisconsin
Northwestern University
Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital
University of Minnesota
University of Wisconsin - Madison

Our institutions share competencies, knowledge assessments and curriculum resources as part of an innovative way to achieve effective global health education across pediatric residency programs.

911 Education For New Immigrants

By fandrey on April 19, 2013 12:12 PM

Pediatric Global Health Track resident, Kristina Krohn, was published in the April issue of Minnesota Medicine with a piece she co-wrote about the importance of educating new immigrants on 911 and the emergency medical system in the U.S.

Said Krohn, "I started this article with Pat Walker over a year ago, and can see how much I've grown since I started writing this. It is fun to see how journalistic and scientific writing can meet."

Read the full article

Vote For Digital African Health Library Project

By fandrey on April 18, 2013 12:42 PM

Digital African Health Library needs your help!

Many of you know Dr. Bruce Dahlman, an innovative health educator who has spent his career in East Africa.

Bruce has created the Digital African Health Library, which contains health information resources to be used at the point of care by rural African primary care physicians. This tool is ready to distribute to thousands of physicians in East Africa.

The next phase of development requires additional funds to add more resources to the library and set up a distribution network in East and South African countries.

Bruce has applied to the Grand Challenges Canada for $100,000 of funding. He needs us to vote for his project.

HOW TO VOTE

1. Watch the video

2. Click Like This Application and complete the Captcha to register your vote. You can vote once per day, so make sure to visit the site again daily.

3. Forward the link to your friends and ask them to vote, too!

Together, let's help Bruce's important and exciting health education project succeed and bring the resources doctors need to the point of care.

Continue reading Vote For Digital African Health Library Project.

Slusher Teaches At Angkor Children's Satellite Clinic

By fandrey on April 17, 2013 12:13 PM

Tina Slusher participates in a Women's Day activity at AHC Satellite Clinic

During Tina Slusher's March 2013 trip to Cambodia, she observed at Angkor Children's Hospital's Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. While there as an observer, she was asked to do some informal teaching in their PICU and some formal teaching for their residents, consultants and staff.

PICU staff report having made several changes to practice as a result of Dr. Slusher's teaching and recommendations.

As part of that invitation, she also was able to enjoy a day a their satellite clinic site, where she taught and observed. The AHC Satellite Clinic is about 20 miles outside of Siem Reap, part of the government-owned Sotnikum Referral Hospital.

Dr. Slusher relays the message that AHC welcomes further U of Minnesota residents who wish to participate, and that this open invitation is largely due to our longstanding partnership with AHC.

Angkor Children's Hospital is a non-profit hospital that provides care to children in northern Cambodia, with arrivals of more than 400 children and families every day.

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