Global Health Opportunities

Reposting from Michael E. Campana’s tweet, author of  WaterWired

http://www.npr.org/2011/04/11/135241362/the-worldwide-thirst-for-clean-drinking-water

Take The Young Nonprofit Professionals Network National Voice Survey before it closes. Takes less than 20 mins!

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/nationalvoicesurvey

Tweeted by the Idealist

The good guide to volunteering. This is a primer to volunteering: it doesn’t have a complete discussion on all the issues (including burnout). The point is that there are many opportunities out there from free programs to others programs that charge YOU $2000 per week (for international experiences). Paid programs are still useful, but if you already have a significant skill to contribute, proceed with caution. My experience is that those paid experiences overseas have the potential to be unorganized and  ”moral busters” for once idealistic future aid workers. A better approach would be to first identify the NGO or group that you identify with. If you feel strongly about a certain cause or purpose, volunteer with that group. Contact them and offer them a volunteership of something specific. You will find that experience much more productive and fulfilling then some of the paid mission experiences that you can get involved with.

For an idea of what people do, see reliefweb and the idealist’s career pages.

Here is an interesting excerpt on giving from NPR. We should all consider that giving and being altruistic is selfish is some respects.  The following is from a New York times opinion page:

Brain scans by neuroscientists confirm that altruism carries its own rewards. A team including Dr. Jorge Moll of the National Institutes of Health found that when a research subject was encouraged to think of giving money to a charity, parts of the brain lit up that are normally associated with selfish pleasures like eating or sex.

The implication is that we are hard-wired to be altruistic. To put it another way, it’s difficult for humans to be truly selfless, for generosity feels so good.

Related is this Huffington post article on the year anniversary in Haiti and how there are thousands of charity organizations.

The idealist.org has 3 innovative national service and fellowship programs which focus on how to creatively to solve serious social and environmental problems in our communities.
There are hundreds of these out there. Start searching here.

As global health professionals, we have to be creative in our search for careers and opportunities. Looking at traditional job resources such as the sites at Emory or Reliefweb may be helpful, but everyone knows the frustration involved with applying to online resources. Job seekers will sometimes send out dozens of applications to Global organizations with little or no response. When we are so far away from these groups, it is hard to know them and make the personal connections required to secure a job or internship. Playing the devil’s advocate, I have heard of many hiring committees who complain about never finding the correct match. In specialized career fields, committees get hordes of applications without any idea of who to choose.

Job seekers and recruiters use their relationships. These relationships are often from people they have met at conferences or online.

This different approach would be to read the many socially conscious or globally relevant websites, blogs, and tweets that are out there. Sometimes becoming active on any particular health issue or interest will lead to a relationship and then an opportunity. A good way to start this is to find blogs that you care about. I have my website homepage pointed to twitter and I find myself reading waterwired and Peter Gleik with the Pacific institute. If you are interested in Global health opportunities, the idealist.org blog may be a good place to start. Reliefweb is also mostly a global development action blog. Those websites can lead you to interesting news blurbs, blogs and tweets about the things you care about. When you respond, you make relationships with real people.

That said, here is a CHF internship reference in Silver Springs, MD. This was forwarded to me from Dr. David Dyjack of ADRA and LLU.

The Global Health Fellows Program has exciting internships for the  summer of 2011. Applications for these compensated positions are due no later than February 4, 2011. Openings are with the US Agency for International Development in the Agency’s Washington, DC headquarters and in Kampala, Uganda with USAID Mission partner organizations.

To learn more about the Global Health Fellows Program, please visit www.ghfp.net. To learn more about USAID, the largest government donor organization in the development field, please visit www.usaid.gov.

Dr. Jayakaran Job and other LLU faculty are researcher partners in NIH’s National Children’s Study.

From School of Public Health News:

The LLU School of Public Health and School of Medicine are helping lead local efforts of a landmark nationwide study, the National Children’s Study. Faculty will participate in monitoring 1,000 children in San Bernardino County from birth until age 21.

Nationwide, the study will follow 105,000 children across the United States. It will keep track of what they eat, drink, touch, and breathe. Other information to be studied includes some of the nation’s most pressing health problems, including autism, birth defects, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity.

Read More at the SPH news website:

Other GLBH faculty who are involved include: Pramil Singh and Seth Wiafe.

Recent graduate, Silvia M. Trigoso MPH, works with CDC as a Public Health Prevention Service (PHPS) Fellow.

Silvia M. Trigoso graduated from the LLU GLBH department with an MPH in 2009. She focused on Global Health and Emergency Preparedness & Response. While at LLUSPH she was able to gain a variety of professional experiences through the guidance and mentorship of various faculty members from the Global Health Department.

From 2007 to 2008, Silvia led the design and implementation of the Living Healthier Pilot Study, a bilingual nutrition and exercise intervention for homeless men and women living with HIV and AIDS within San Bernardino’s Central City Lutheran Mission community. Silvia also continues to offer support to her home country by providing programmatic assistance to an ongoing oral health project implemented by the Chijnaya Foundation and the Peruvian American Dental Association in Chijnaya, an agrarian community in Peru’s Altiplano. This project stems from her fieldwork conducted on Peru ICD 2008. In 2009, as part of her field practicum, Silvia developed tobacco-control advocacy material for the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids in Washington, D.C., a non-profit organization funded under the Bloomberg Initiative, which garners support for comprehensive tobacco-control policy implementation in low and middle-income countries.

Currently, Silvia resides in Atlanta where she is a Public Health Prevention Service (PHPS) Fellow at the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC). PHPS is a 3-year training and service fellowship for master’s level public health professionals. The fellowship focuses on public health program management and provides experience in program planning, implementation, and evaluation through specialized hands-on training and mentorship at CDC, and in state and local health organizations. As part of her first CDC rotation, Silvia is a member of the Program Evaluation Team with the Division of Tuberculosis Elimination where she coordinates and participates on various activities put forth by the Tuberculosis Program Evaluation Network. Additionally, Silvia is in the process of completing an evaluation of the tuberculosis-control program evaluations plans submitted by 68 jurisdictions (i.e. 50 states, 10 big cities, and 8 island/territories) of the United States, which will prove useful for the technical support the evaluation team provides jurisdictions.

Silvia is willing to to talk to current and prospective students.

Dr. Ron Mataya received funding for research in Malawi.

Dr. Mataya obtained prestigious CDC/PEPFAR funding in partnership with colleagues at the University of North Carolina, Johns Hopkins and University of Malawi College of Medicine, to improve clinical laboratory services in Malawi. In addition to this CDC allocated operations research funds to test the reliability of recent technologies used at point of care early infant diagnosis of HIV and the use of dry blood samples for measuring viral loads in patients on antiretroviral treatment. The project is for 5 years.

Dr. Mataya is recently published with an article titled “An assessment of sex work in Swaziland: barriers to and opportunities for HIV prevention among sex workers.”

This peer reviewed article is published in SAHARA (Social Aspects of HIV/AIDS Research Alliance) Vol. 7 No. 3, October 2010. The SAHARA journal is an open access journal and the article is downloadable for free.

From the abstract: “The findings from the study suggest that treating sex workers as a homogenous group that is driven into, or maintain sex work only because of poverty may be problematic”.  Read More…