In remembrance of Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Michael Merson, director of Duke's Global Health Institute, began his presentation Tuesday morning with one of King's quotes.
"Of all forms of insecurity, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane," King once said.
Merson said the world can no longer exist half healthy and half sick at his presentation, "Global Health and Duke," yesterday.
"In 2004, 41.1 percent of the people living in Sub-Saharan Africa were living on less than $1 a day and 29.5 percent of people living in Southern Asia were living on less than $1 a day," he noted.
He also called for health professionals to take action, adding that in the last 40 years, there has been an average of one new disease per year. Most of the new diseases are infectious and viral, he added.
Merson said the global health community needs to think of the health burden in terms of chronic diseases, such as obesity, in the next two decades.
"In 2005, about 1.6 billion adults were overweight and at least 400 million were obese," he said. "By 2015, approximately 2.3 billion adults will be overweight and more than 700 million will be obese."
Duke has set forth a number of global-health initiatives, and one of the driving forces behind the University's decisions has been student passion for social justice and wanting to make a difference, he said.
Sophomore Georgia Hoyler, who participated in the Global Health Focus last Fall, said she became interested in global health after volunteering in Calcutta, India in high school.
"I saw old women with terrible osteoporosis, who probably had not received any health care for the majority of their lives," she said. "I was struck by the huge health inequalities and lack of [global health] programs worldwide. It really opened my eyes."
Junior Aneesh Kapur, who worked on global-health issues through DukeEngage, traveled to New Delhi, India last summer to help improve living conditions of the poor.
"Most of my interest in global health is coming from the fact that I visited a lot of other countries and developing nations," he said. "Through [those experiences], I gained perspective on how we have a lot of things in the United States that people don't have in other places in the world."
Merson said DGHI is continuously looking for ways for students to pursue their interests in global health.
The institute helped begin a global health certificate for undergraduate and graduate students, and its first class will be graduating this year, Merson said. He added that the institute is in the process of developing a major in global health as well.
Internationally, DGHI initiated the Global Health PLUS program to make surplus medical equipment and supplies available to health care professionals in developing countries, he said.
Merson added that Duke will soon be building an office at the Duke-National University of Singapore Graduate Medical School to do clinical research and will further collaborate with Peking University to begin an educational program in global health, establishing it as the first Asian university to do so.
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