The Latest News from VIGH

 

General Information Session for Medical Students What: Learn about exciting global health opportunities during medical school When: Tuesday, July 21 at 5 p.m. Where: Light Hall 411

 

This story was submitted and written by Zacarias Chuquela, District Community Involvement Assistant for Friends in Global Health (FGH), Vanderbilt's affiliate organization working in rural Mozambique.

Established in 2012 as a joint effort between the Division of Infectious Diseases within the Department of Medicine and the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health, the Vanderbilt Tuberculosis Center is a focal point for collaborative efforts and tuberculosis research with an emphasis on epidemiology, clinical trials, and translational research. The Center works to cultivate and mentor junior faculty members, fellows, and students from Vanderbilt University, Meharry Medical College, and collaborating health departments and international institutions.

Every minute a child dies of malaria.  And it’s a disease that’s preventable and curable!   A special team at Vanderbilt is in the thick of the fight against malaria and other diseases—with the help of a 3-d printer.

Vanderbilt University researchers have received a five-year, $1.2 million grant from the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to strengthen research ethics capacity in Mozambique.

Twelve years ago, my husband and I packed up all of our belongings and moved to Trivandrum — a steamy, tropical town at the southern tip of India in Kerala. At the time, I was a medical student interested in studying stroke. For the next six months I dressed in a sari and walked to work on jungle roads. At the hospital, I immediately began seeing a steady stream of young patients affected by strokes, many of whom were so severely disabled that they were unable to work.

For Dr. Rachel T. Idowu, her Fogarty fellowship in Africa helped her gain the skills needed to conduct research in low-income settings - skills that were immediately useful when she finished the program and began work at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 

A Framework grant awarded to Drs. David W. Wright, Frederik Haselton and Douglas Heimburger at Vanderbilt University is enabling a dozen American and Zambian research trainees to develop and deploy novel solutions for this critical issue. A new inexpensive test would improve the likelihood of detecting infection and also reduce drug resistance in the parasite by treating only those who harbor it instead of blanket-treating anyone with a fever, which commonly occurs in malaria endemic countries. 

Vanderbilt University has received a $3 million grant from the GE Foundation’s Developing Health Globally program to fund international medical education and research in Kenya and other low-resource regions of the world. 

From the bustling streets of Shanghai and Lusaka, to the dairy and potato farms of Túquerres, on Colombia’s high Andean plateau, Vanderbilt University researchers are scouring the world to reveal the secrets of cancer.