The organizing committee comprised solely of NCSSM students, who played an instrumental role in inviting speakers and selecting audience members.

Here is Dr. Cohen’s talk on fighting infection:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Melia (on the right in the green striped shirt) works as a cleaner at the fistula care unit at Bwaila Maternity Hospital in Lilongwe, Malawi.  She is a very hard worker and a true inspiration for the other patients and staff.  She had fistula surgery over a year ago and is completely dry.  She needed some additional surgery, which was performed by Jeff Wilkinson and his team the week before this video was shot.

One day at 6:00 in the morning, Melia was ready for singing.

For more on UNC’s Maternal and Neonatal Health Program in Malawi, visit http://malawimaternalhealth.org

Earlier this year, a group of young South African scientists gathered for an intensive manuscript writing course which is held annually for participants in the South African TB/AIDS Training Program (SATBAT).  The course is led by SATBAT co-principal investigators Charlie van der Horst (UNC) and Neil Martinson (University of the Witwatersrand).  One of the past participants not only published his first three papers just months after completing the course, but also went on to send three of his own trainees to the course. “It was a lot of fun, as usual,” said Dr. van der Horst.

We’ve written about the manuscript writing course previously here.

- Lisa

Last week, WTVD reporter and anchor Steve Daniels stopped by our offices, where we were hosting about 15 faculty and staff members in the new GWH Division, all here from Zambia and Malawi, for a planning retreat. Jeff Stringer, professor of Ob-Gyn and director of the division, said they have so many things they want to do to improve the health of women and their babies in that part of the world.  Unfortunately, they can’t do it all. It will be tough to choose, he said.

If you are having trouble viewing the video, click here.

- Lisa

Greg Allgood at the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro, climbing for water awareness with Summit on the Summit

Well OK, it’s not Mount Everest, but 19,341 feet is nothing to sneeze about.  Last week, a team of cultural influencers and clean water advocates successfully reached the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro to raise awareness of the global clean water crisis. Summit on the Summit is an innovative transmedia initiative that aims to build awareness and inspire change around the access to clean water.

Among the 17 climbers, which included musicians, actors and activists, was Greg Allgood, director of Procter & Gamble’s Children’s Safe Drinking Water and UNC partner on clean water projects in Malawi. After a seven-day, 50-mile trek (and that 20,000 foot climb), Greg still managed to shoot this great photo.

Congratulations, Greg, on a safe and successful Summit on the Summit!

Learn more about SOTS at summitonthesummit.com and on social media:

•  @SOTSK on Twitter
•  summitonthesummit on Facebook
•  summitonthesummit on Myspace
•  sotsk on Instagram
•  sotsk on Tumblr

Over the past thirty years, China has undergone rapid social and economic changes that have led it to become the world’s second largest economy. At the same time, sexually transmitted infections have made a dramatic comeback in China. Nearly eradicated during public health campaigns of the 1950s, syphilis cases have increased tenfold in the past decade to more than 20 cases per 100,000 people. China’s urban areas have been hit hard, with syphilis becoming the most common infection in Shanghai, and more syphilis cases in the wealthy province of Guangdong than in the entire European Union combined.

Traditional top-down public health models are poorly structured to address the sexual health concerns of China’s most at-risk populations. One-size-fits-all public health interventions are no longer feasible nor effective in China’s rapidly diversifying civil society. In addition, the global financial crisis has led many governments and community-based organizations (CBOs) to re-structure public health initiatives.

On October 31, Dr. Joe Tucker, an infectious disesase specialist at UNC and director of UNC Project-China, organized and chaired the second annual Social Entrepreneurship for Sexual Health (SESH) conference at the University of Hong Kong. The two-day meeting brought together community leaders, academic researchers, public health experts, and entrepreneurs in one room to discuss innovative solutions for the HIV and STD epidemics in China.

SESH harnesses the power of social enterprise in order to provide creative, sustainable answers to global health problems. CBOs have already begun offering sexual health services, although they are dependent on external funding for financial support. Independent revenue-generating enterprises will allow CBOs to become more community-responsive and sustainable. By building CBO financial and organizational capacity, SESH will help CBOs offer more accessible decentralized sexual heath services.

Sexual norms are changing rapidly among China’s young population, who are now wealthier, more educated, more mobile and more connected than ever before. SESH integrates the unique human, fiscal, and technological resources available in China today, in order to enable sexual health service delivery among its most at-risk populations.

- Cedric

Editor’s note: Subscribe to our news feed or follow @uncglobalhealth on Twitter for updates on the SESH project.

Lynn Tillery is a clinical research associate at the UNC Center for AIDS Research. She works on Project ImPact with investigators David Wohl and Carol Golin. Project ImPact examines facilitators and barriers to medical care and services for people with HIV who have just been released from the prison system. For Lynn, this means traveling all around the state to meet with and help research participants who are transitioning from incarceration to freedom.

To her study participants, Lynn Tillery is much more than a research associate.

Lynn’s job includes recruiting HIV positive people in the North Carolina correctional system to participate in Project ImPact. She visits them in prison and collects information about their lives, health, and plans for after they are released. Lynn visits the participants again within 24 hours of their being released, when she provides them with a cell phone and supplies like toiletries, condoms, and a clean shirt. She helps them count their HIV medications and prepares them for their medication regimen outside of prison.

She makes four additional visits, traveling to the study participants’ hometowns to ask them about their physical, mental, and social health, access to health care, and adherence to their medication regimen. At each visit, she draws blood to measure their viral load and CD4 count to track the progression of the HIV virus.

Being in the field is significantly different from looking at study participants on paper. “It brings a human aspect to everything,” Lynn said. She has realized that “there is a big distinction between viewing a person in a database before release and actually seeing them on the day they get out of prison.” Sometimes “they have nowhere to go and are down about life in general.” Often their family “has discarded them for one reason or another and they have no one to look to,” she said. “In the field, you get the raw version of everything. To some of these inmates, you are the only positive role model in their lives.”

Lynn currently has five former inmates who call her for everything, including decisions about jobs, housing, and life in general. They will also call to share good news, such as having gotten a job interview. “They just want someone to tell them they are doing a good job and are going in the right direction,” she said. Lynn has become “an important part of their lives, because some of them have no one else that they trust to help them.”

For Lynn, the most rewarding aspect of her job is when she gets a chance to positively affect the quality of life of study participants. “I have seen some people completely turn their lives around, going from a shelter with nothing but the clothes on their backs, to having their own place to live,” she said. Health wise, she has seen study participants go from having a viral load “in the millions” to having no detectible virus and “living a healthy life.”

Although Lynn is not certain where her career will lead her, she is sure that it will include working with people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS.

The UNC CFAR is fortunate and grateful to have dedicated team members like Lynn Tillery and her colleagues.

Watch Monday, September 24, 2012 on PBS. See more from NC Now.

Afterwards, Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of NIAID, presented him with a fancy award.

You can hear Dr. Cohen’s talk, “Working to End the HIV Pandemic: Glimmers of Hope, ” here.

Myron Cohen (left) and Anthony Fauci of NIAID

On the burn unit at Kamuzu Central Hospital. Photo: Caitlin Kleiboer

In Zambia and elsewhere, governments are turning to “task shifting” to address these shortages. Task shifting involves training clinical officers and other health care workers in basic, common surgical procedures.

I shared the column with Dr. Jeff Wilkinson, who leads our emergency obstetrics efforts in neighboring Malawi. “Task shifting in surgery is working well in many low-resource settings,” he said. “As noted in the article, it does not replace the need for fully trained surgeons and specialists, but can provide basic, safe surgical care to the masses.”

Wilkinson cautions that “any expansion of surgical training must be balanced by a commensurate increase in hospital capacity and training of qualified anesthesia and nursing personnel. After all, the surgeon usually cannot operate alone.”

Through the Malawi Surgical Initiative, UNC has started a new surgical resident training program at Kamuzu Central Hospital in Lilongwe to address the shortage of surgeons in that country.

Bansal quotes a researcher who believes surgery needs much more attention on the global health map.

Maybe UNC can play an important part in that.

IGHID director Mike Cohen told me, “Getting attention to this problem and resources is exceptionally hard. We need to redouble our efforts, with the leadership of UNC’s inspiring surgeons and gynecologists.”

Read the NYT column, “Repairing the Surgery Deficit”

- Lisa