Duke Health Goes Global

There are endless ways to change the world.

If you're investor Warren Buffett and you have an extra $31 billion dollars, you could donate it to a major global health foundation.

Or, if you're Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, you could harness your paparazzi power for your baby's first photos, then donate all five-to-seven million to African relief projects.

And if you're Duke University, you can make use of a network of thousands of students, training their minds and hearts to take initiative and solve global health problems.

But first, you have to make them care.

Rewind to April 2006. A bus exploded at the West Campus bus stop, a lacrosse team went down in flames and the Duke Global Health Institute opened with what would have been a headline-grabbing symposium. Somehow, it wasn't.

Paul Farmer-Dokte Paul, the global health rockstar-attended the event. So did Duke University President Richard Brodhead and Duke University Health System Chancellor Victor Dzau. Joep Lange, former president of the International AIDS Society, and Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize winner, also made an appearance.

Except that on April 18-the day of the symposium-the arrests of two lacrosse players for alleged rape and kidnapping overshadowed what was supposed to be the main event.

But, somehow, he sends an e-mail anyway. "This is a priority," he writes. "So I'll be happy to talk."

Cook-Deegan and Bart Haynes, the other co-chair of the steering committee, have spent a year as the de facto leaders of the Global Health Initiative, the forerunner to the Institute. In that year, they haven't encountered any opposition to their short-term goals-a feat almost unheard of in academic circles. Everyone, from Brodhead to Dzau to individual academic deans and professors, has been on board from the beginning.

"The provost and the president have just made it their highest priorities," Haynes says.

Even with the complete cooperation of every professor, president and provost, the Institute's broader goals will be a little bit harder to reach.

They're not going to cure the 24.5 million people living with AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. No individual professor is going to stop the spread of tuberculosis, which killed 1.7 million people in 2004, or malaria, which killed three-quarters of a million African children last year. Closer to home, Brodhead and Dzau can't solve Durham's healthcare inequalities by themselves either.

At least, not right away, and not by themselves.

But together, Duke's 12,000 students and 2,500 faculty members can make a difference. At least, that's what Cook-Deegan and Haynes are banking on.

"We want all students and all community members to be mindful of the fact that we're living in a global community," Haynes says. "If someone wants to be a doctor, we want them to practice medicine understanding the importance of living in a global community. If someone wants to be a businessman on Wall Street-that's fine-but they'll practice their craft with an understanding of the importance of the global community."

If every student that comes through Duke leaves with a desire to combat health problems around the world, the reasoning goes, then the University will have contributed to solving the world's most unsolvable problems.

With that in mind, the Global Health Institute is designed to extend to every part of Duke, aiming to make global health a University-wide concern.

But the first step is bringing the Global Health Institute into the spotlight. That's why Cook-Deegan found a way to communicate from backwoods Switzerland, and why Haynes took time off from a vacation in Barcelona to talk global health.

They know that global health hasn't mattered much at Duke in the last year, because, quite frankly, the Institute hasn't done much to inspire excitement. Outside of the creation of a FOCUS program and a certificate program, most of the Global Health Initiative's work has been centered on finding a full-time director for the Institute.

They've been looking for an internationally known scholar in global health, and they've interviewed dozens of candidates-scientists, demographers, businessmen and physicians. No one's talking about the candidates for now, but a buzz-making announcement is expected early in the fall.

After that, who knows what might happen? "This year will be the year that it will explode upon the scene," Haynes says.

Down the line, the goal is to deliver healthcare services in communities from Tanzania to Durham and everywhere in between. The Institute will teach service providers of all levels the best ways to approach healthcare in far-flung regions and locally. And then, of course, the objective becomes supplying that care.

Cook-Deegan and Haynes say that a lot of people at Duke are eager to do something to help fix global health's big problems. The task of the Global Health Institute will be coordinating that desire to help and providing outlets for action.

Starting this year, Duke is ready to step up to the front lines in the fight against some of the world's biggest health problems.

And you'll be there to help.