Why not combine a program on global health with a more general commitment to sustainable development? In particular, perhaps Dartmouth could implement one of the proposed 'solutions' to climate change (say, for simplicity's sake, a $0.25/gallon tax on all fossil fuel use by the College) and use that money for a sustainable development initiative that would fund various combinations of basic health care, clean water, education, sustainable farming techniques, etc., in two or more communities in Madagascar (for example). This could generate plenty of opportunities for faculty & student research on the impact of the tax on the energy use of the College and on the efficacy of various interventions on the well-being of the populations served.

Kim Perez

In order to ensure the economic viability of any project, we should consider investing our energies in those areas of interest for the United States. As an example, we've seen attention to the Balkans wane recently, which has adversely affected interest in our Kosova initiative. The US Gov't's interest starts with the National Security Strategy (http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.pdf); this overarching strategy with other ongoing government intitiatives may lead us to fruitful, sustainable projects.

I'd be interested in opening a conversation about how this initiative might interact with mathematical modeling in medicine and biology. Every year I teach math 4, which draws between 15 and 25 students, usually premed. We study pharmacokinetics, ecology modeling, and mathematical modeling associated with malaria (epidemiology, physiology, ecology models). Some years Dr. Bzik from the tropical medicine group visits. By the end of the course my students are very aware of issues in controlling malaria. For example, a typical year would include one group doing a model of epidemiology to see if the World Health Organization is correct when they claim that putting mosquito nets over every child would reduce the death rate due to malaria. They might be very interested in continuing their work one way or another.

Also, the math department is considering developing a major in biomathematics. A major component of this ought to be research projects. Also, we have an applied math major which would benefit from some research opportunities. I notice the issue of sustainability is mentioned in your blog-- that is something that would benefit from some modeling too.

I am interested in applying quantitative and modeling methods to public health problems, too. I am teaching geographic information system classes at Dartmouth. This term, a student in my Geography 58 class did a term project about using GIS to find the best locations for establishing malaria aid posts in Botswana.

Right now I am collaberating with some people from DMS on an NIH project on the spatial patter of lung cancer incidences in NH.

I'm in Linguistics and DAMELL (Dept of Asian & Mid East Lang & Culture). My research focus is risk and medical communications and the consumer, and next year I'm due to offer a course "Communication and Discourse in Asia & the Middle East".

I would like to suggest these two projects for GHI, in the hope of finding collaborators in DMS:

"Communicating first-aid information for hazardous workplace substances"
Neither international nor national standards are much concerned with communicatively adequate first-aid information for hazardous substances. Notorious problems include: Inability or unwillingness to create nontechnical first-aid narratives; low literacy; multilinguality; cross-cultural inadequacy of pictograms as well as text. Applying cross-cultural discourse theory, this project will examine the functionality of hazchem first-aid texts and oral workplace training, identifying problems and seeking solutions that could have cross-cultural application.

(2) "Helping patients with decision making in developing countries"
Foreign professionals advising patients in developing countries about health care choices are typically unaware of the critical impact on patient response of the 'pragmatics' of language, i.e. implied messages about the goal of what is being said and the authority behind it -- how one warns and reassures, how one conveys the probability of an outcome ('may, could' etc) and the desirability of a treatment, how one projects its sense of authority, how one shows due respect for traditional medicine etc. Using cross-cultural pragmatic models, this project will gather data on patient response to medical advice in a variety of geographical and cultural settings, as a first step towards creating a major cross-cultural communicative database for health advice-givers.