I went to the Consortium of Universities for Global Health meeting Monday and Tuesday September 20-21. The purpose of the conference was to discuss the role of the university in promoting global health. I had been talking with Nandan for some years now about doing things to attract enough students to merit the establishment of some formal relationship between some NGO we set up in Varanasi and some university in America, so this conference was especially interesting to me.
Attending the conference was $300, which I did not have. A note said that there were press passes available so I wrote them with the pitch that I would photograph the attendees and put the pictures on Wikipedia as public domain content. I got no reply, so I showed up a little late for the usual plan. The girl watching the door told me to go to the registration desk but I told her I was late and wanted to go to the in-progress welcoming lecture, and she let me in. I did take pictures of more than 10 speakers in the conference who already had Wikipedia articles without accompanying photos.
It was a nice surprise to see Joe Torres there. He used to have Gail Broder’s HVTN job and now works with the Gates’ Foundation’s Grand Challenges project. It seems like a sweet job but it he is appropriate for it; he does review of the project proposals and most of these have an emphasis on using new technology to promote global health. He is multilingual, speaking French, Portuguese, and Spanish (the colonial languages…) and anyone who was older than he was would not have the native understanding of computer applications, so I cannot imagine how a job like this could be done without a person like him. He was formerly a Fred Hutch IRB person also.
Louis Fazen is a Yale guy who works with Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM), which is a multi-university student organization which promotes the sharing of medical research knowledge instead of locking it behind IP protection laws as most universities default to doing. They do this by raising ownership awareness and providing legal document templates for universities to use to free their property. One of their programs is the “Access Metrics Initiative” which provides website communication tools. He told a fantastic story about Bristol-Myers Squibb making a drug through Yale with NIH funding, then there were protests in 2000 in Africa about the drug not being available. Somehow I did not note the drug…
James Blanchard from the University of Manitoba worked in Karnataka from 2001-08 in an HIV program. He complained that there is little consensus about efficacy for even trivial interventions, such as what indicators to use to recommend the start of antiviral drug therapy.
Karen Wannerstrom at UW’s Department of Global Health worked in India for some time as an educator. She invited me to come to departmental meetings.
William “Phil” Nicholson is the “Assistant Attorney General” for the University of Washington. He talked about the process of registering the UW to do work in other countries. The problem was that other countries use an NGO system instead of a non-profit system, so since American universities are government-affiliated, sometimes this disqualifies them from registering as foreign NGOs to operate in some other country. Kate Riley of UW’s “Global Support Project” talked about this same problem, and the USD $50k problem – apparently many foreign banks did not like the UW keeping more than $50,000 in a local bank account, and yet it was impractical for the UW to operate with less than that. She told bizarre stories about researchers who had to carry thousands of dollars in cash into the country because they could identify no legal way to have the money pass from UW to the researcher otherwise. Anne Bax at Duke is Riley’s supervisor, I think. This Global Operations Support website seems to be their page because Phil Nicholson’s and Kate Riley’s names are here. Somehow these people knew Connie Celum (who I know as an HVTN researcher) and of her work in Kenya. Donna Gallagher of the University of Massachusetts Medical School recommended their website to contact people to talk about the logistics of overseas research. Particular problems which she discussed were buying cars and cashing checks in other countries, and also she talked about forcing encrypted data storage on personal laptops for students who are accustomed to having total control over their personal laptops.
Susanna Holmes is a lawyer for Johns Hopkins and she talked about the difficulty of negotiating research with other countries. She said that a team from her school wanted to do research in Pakistan, and they had to seek permission from the government. The Pakistani government made an offer in writing that in exchange for their permission, the university would promise not to hire any Indians or Israelis for this project. When large organizations seek permission for things from foreign governments, there are some guidelines from our own federal government. One of them is to report racist requests to our Department of the Treasury, who in turn keep records of who asks these things and when and in what context. Surely the Pakistani government knows that these things are noticed, right? In the end, she said, they removed the request and allowed the project without that rule.
Richard Wilkinson works with I-Tech, which is a collaboration between the UW and UCSF to provide procedure design for medical processes in developing countries. They do this by codifying treatments into steps and then making software to document these steps and train people to do them. He used the words “replicable, adaptable, scalable, practical, and balanced” to describe what they want. The problem is said he was currently researching was how to pay foreign researchers; it was neither quite fair to pay them by US standards or by local standards, plus non-monetary compensation is especially troublesome but must not be ignored.