On Wednesday, 12 November 2014, the third Bay Area Global Health Series Seminar of the year was held at UC Berkeley. The seminar series is a quarterly seminar collaboration between UCSF, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and Stanford which brings together global health experts from each school to talk about pressing global health issues. This topic of this day: Bay Area Perspectives on Population Growth, Environment, and Public Health. The panel explored research and ideas about complex global health challenges and priorities for a growing, interconnected, and crowded Earth.
Panelists included Jenna Davis, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University; David Vlahov, Dean of the School of Nursing at UCSF; Ted Miguel, Faculty Director of the Center for Effective Global Action at UC Berkeley; and Howard Yana-Shapiro, Senior Fellow at the Department of Plant Sciences at UC Davis. Stefano Bertozzi, the Dean of the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley, moderated the event and Ndola Prata, Director of the Bixby Center at UC Berkeley presented opening and closing remarks.
The panelists presented perspectives from their specialty areas on the issues they felt were most pressing to population growth and public health. Topics ranged from sanitation, urbanization, nutritional security, and climate and violence–from Africa to the streets of Baltimore in the United States. Perhaps the most interesting part of the afternoon was the one hundred million dollar question. One audience member asked the panel, ‘If you were give one hundred million dollars, tax free, to set up a foundation to take on global action on a crowded earth, what would be your priority and how would you address it?’
Ted Miguel jumped on the question first by reminding the audience that while the discussions have focused on low and middle-income countries and vulnerable populations, the U.S. and other developed nations are not immune to the effects of climate change; he explained that the relationship between GDP and extreme global temperature is indeed not a trivial problem. Miguel would use his one hundred million dollars in an African rural setting to implement good water capture and irrigation schemes citing that in Western Tanzania, dislocation occurs during drought years; if people had better water storage, their crops wouldn’t fail every year. They could secure better livelihoods without having to migrate.
Jenna Davis had two words for the audience: “urban sanitation.” Davis advocated for viable models for urban sanitation that don’t require 15,000 liters of potable water per person per year. She noted that not only would this directly reduce exposure to pathogens through the fecal-oral route, it would also indirectly promote resource conservation, energy production, and create models that developed countries would have to start looking at in order to sustain their own population moving into the future.
David Vlahov spoke through the lens of a nurse, pointing out that by putting money into programs, they often begin and end and there is no guarantee of a big impact. He asked us, “Where can we invest money where we know there will be a long-term impact?” He stated that if people are increasingly moving into urban settings, in order to find solutions, we first have to find out about their experiences, their governance, and then once we identify those experiences and potential issues they face, we can start to find different interventions. Vlahov proposed the idea of having a network of urban health observatories especially in low/middle income countries where urbanization is the biggest challenge moving forward, where each observatory can watch what is happening and collaborate with other observatories to identify larger trends and problems. David noted that surveillance is the key to finding specific and sensitive solutions for individual areas on a grander scale.
Howard Yana-Shapiro decided that nitrogen fixation for wheat, rice, maize, and other crops would be where he spent his one hundred million dollars. Moderator of the event, Dean Stefano Bertozzi, said he would invest the money in education–through tools and building learning capacity. Ndola Prata gave her closing remarks and in full representation of the Bixby Center said that she would invest one hundred million dollars into family planning, pointing out that solutions are hard to come by in a world where numbers of residents are increasing by the second.
The next Bay Area Global Health Seminar will take place at UC Davis in February 2015. To see a video recording of this event, please visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnFRN7YQws8