Kevin Bardosh isn’t like a lot of his co-workers at the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute. Not only is he a qualitative social scientist in a sea of quantitative types, he’s also a long way from his home institution, the University of Edinburgh
UF researchers at the Emerging Pathogens Institute (EPI) published a study last October showing that the bacterium that causes cholera has become endemic within parts of Haiti.
Conditions such as cholera and malaria pose serious public health threats to Haiti’s population, and numerous programs have been put in place to help combat them. However, these public health efforts typically operate in disease-specific silos, potentially losing out on benefits that could be yielded from targeting multiple health threats at once.
With funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, researchers from the University of Florida will be better armed to fight cholera and malaria in Haiti. Both diseases pose serious public health threats to the population.
When a magnitude-7.0 earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, the world wanted to help.
Cholera could be contained in Haiti by vaccinating less than half the population, University of Florida researchers suggest in a paper to be published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.
