Downs Fellows Present International Research Projects

A dozen Downs Fellows from the Yale School of Public Health joined colleagues from the schools of medicine and nursing to present the results of their international research at the annual symposium and poster session to a capacity crowd in the Hope Auditorium.

During opening remarks to the returning fellows, Dean Paul D. Cleary noted that the fellowship’s endowment continues to grow through donations and that the number of fellowships per year has risen by about a third over the last decade. The emerging interdisciplinary nature of this work, “are [Downs’] fondest dreams come true,” he said. Professors Richard Blitsky, YSM; Rosana Gonzalez-Colaso, Physician Associate Program; and Lois Sadler, YSN, represented Yale’s other health professional schools.

The Downs International Health Student Travel Fellowship, more commonly known as the Downs Fellowship, honors Wilbur Downs (1913-1991), M.D., M.P.H., a professor of epidemiology and public health at Yale. Founded in 1966, the fellowship has sponsored more than 400 international research projects by Yale students in low- and middle-income countries.

“He [Dr. Downs] was a groundbreaking global health researcher, long before the term global health was used,” said Kaveh Khoshnood, an assistant professor at YSPH and chairman of the Downs Committee. During his long career, Downs directed a malaria control program in Mexico, established a program in Trinidad to investigate arthropod-borne viruses and worked to isolate and characterizes many other viruses, including the deadly Lassa Fever virus.

Roland Dimaya, an M.P.H. candidate in the Health Policy and Administration division, used the fellowship to examine the Philippine policy response to nurse migration. He interviewed government and private-sector administrators and held focus groups with nurses from urban and provincial settings from which he conceptualized key policy points to better understand how the Philippines, as a leader in global labor migration, is seeking to balance its economy with its health care. Since the current financial crisis along with tightening U.S. immigration policies, there is now an oversupply of nurses, the quality of their training has gone down and some nurses find working conditions exploitive. The Philippine government is responding, Dimaya said, by reforming education, improving health care availability in its rural areas and looking at emerging markets in China and other places.

Also representing YSPH was Benjamin Simms, an M.P.H. candidate in the division of Epidemiology of Microbial Disease. Simms investigated whether nutritional status played a role in the response to treatment given to children who are infected with hookworm in Ghana. Simms’ project combined fieldwork—enrolling children, doing nutritional surveys and collecting blood and stool samples—with laboratory tasks such as egg counts. His research found a high rate of treatment failure (55 percent) and a high prevalence of coinfections such as anemia (71 percent) and malaria (85 percent).

Other 2010 Downs projects include Andrew Chan’s spatial distribution study of dengue cases in Dominica, Samantha Diamond’s analysis of prolonged pretrial detention in rural Haiti, Elyssa Gelmann’s research on the effects of maternal arsenic exposure on birth weight in Romania and Karen Payne’s work to develop a test to detect cutaneous leishmaniasis in Colombia. A total of 21 Yale internships were funded by the Downs Fellowship over the summer.

Slideshows on several Downs projects and other YSPH internships can be viewed at publichealth.yale.edu/news/slideshows/internships/index.aspx.