Report from participation in Annual conference of Consortium of Universities for Global Health, 20-23/02/2025, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
The 16th. Annual conference of the Consortium of Universities for Global health brought together 1344 participants from 61 countries. The main theme of the conference was “Innovating and implementing in global health for a sustainable future”. There were 8 plenary sessions, 42 oral presentation sessions and > 500 poster presentations.
I presented a poster based on our visit and grant application for work in AFAR region of Ethiopia and enjoyed a lot of discussion at it with mostly young researchers from USA and in one case from Korea. The poster will be posted at SDU library in Esbjerg campus as part of the research club activities.
In following, I summarize my experience from sessions I managed to attend:
· The pre-conference workshop on “future of global health” was a very timely and interesting active workshop based on a paper published by organizers of the workshop (available at https://annalsofglobalhealth.org/articles/4616/files/6794a9c69371c.pdf). There were five roundtables with randomly seated participants discussing specific issues such as definition of global health, critical challenges, emerging trends, global governance, funding and data need. During the discussion I raised three issues
o The need to focus on building systems instead of focusing on publications – needs in target countries are very far from number of scientific publications published based on research. Implementation and set up of long-term sustainable systems and infrastructure should be the aim of global health activities
o We shall consider dropping the categorization of countries based on economic measures. Global health should orientate toward problem solving and it does not matter whether the problem is in LIMC or a high-income country. This was based on example of a colleague form Barbados, where most of native population is rather low income, but due to many billionaires having property there the country as such is categorized as high income!
o Global health should open op from being an academic discipline to everyday life of people and include other sectors
Organizers will summarize the gathered ideas and propose an update of the above-mentioned publication. I signed up for receiving the new draft for comments before submitted for publication.
· A second pre-conference workshop I joined was on AI in global health and covered an overview of existing applications, methods mostly focusing on low- and middle-income countries. It was a very high-level workshop with general and also specific information through example of AI applications supporting selection of best treatment methods for cancer cure or respiratory disease. After workshop I contacted the two organizers, Dr. Katherine Robsky and bachelor student Saara Bidiwala explaining them our plan with a
new course as well as my other activities on this field (work in Olomouc, Czech Republic and guest editing a special volume of International journal of Public health on this subject) and they kindly offered collaboration an all issues. During the conference I joined two other sessions on AI issues discussing legal and data security subjects as well as applications to support health literacy in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania on case of cervical cancer prevention.
· There was a session on collaboration with China organized by Roger Glass, former director of Fogarty International Center of NIH USA and now president of Chinese Medical Academy. CMA is an organization coordinating collaboration of USA universities with Chinese partners both on research and students’ internships. Content wise this session was a bit of disappointment as it was in principle reporting of young students excited by their internships to rather aging audience at end of their careers. There was not really presented scientific topic related to individual collaborations.
· Another highlight of the conference was the plenary session on planetary health. Planetary health is a recent emerging trend in global health addressing the Anthropocene era and interaction of the Earth systems with biosphere and humans. Three keynote speakers highlighted different aspects of planetary health focusing on role of values, environmental activism and methodology. I contacted two of speakers, Carlos Faerron Guzman (Costa Rica-USA-Spain) and Cedric Colmar (France) and both promised to do an online lecture to our students within global health specialization.
· A traditional highlight of CUGH conferences is the “Great Global Health Debate” where two speakers argue and comment on a posted question. This year the question was “Be it resolved that Academia should be engaged in politics?”. In a vote before, about 98% of participants voted “yes” and the rest “against”. Nelson Sewankambo, president of Makerere University, Uganda was the debater arguing for and Judd Watson, chair of Department of International health of Bloomberg School of Public Health, John Hopkins University argued against. After 10+5 minutes to both debaters and public discussion the voting was repeated and reached a 50-50 score! The main argument made by Judd Watson was in distinguishing between individual academic approach and Academia as institution approach. He also enlisted historical examples when Academia was wrong in opinion.
In general, the conference was again a great experience and I can strongly recommend it to everybody interested for global health. It is a unique place where people of different professional, social and cultural experience meet, where clinical medicine and public health meet and always with timely themes. The next annual conference is April 9-12 in Washington DC, I expect abstract submission opening by end of May-June 2025.
Gabriel
Esbjerg, 28/02/2025
The 16th. Annual conference of the Consortium of Universities for Global health brought together 1344 participants from 61 countries. The main theme of the conference was “Innovating and implementing in global health for a sustainable future”. There were 8 plenary sessions, 42 oral presentation sessions and > 500 poster presentations.
I presented a poster based on our visit and grant application for work in AFAR region of Ethiopia and enjoyed a lot of discussion at it with mostly young researchers from USA and in one case from Korea. The poster will be posted at SDU library in Esbjerg campus as part of the research club activities.
In following, I summarize my experience from sessions I managed to attend:
· The pre-conference workshop on “future of global health” was a very timely and interesting active workshop based on a paper published by organizers of the workshop (available at https://annalsofglobalhealth.org/articles/4616/files/6794a9c69371c.pdf). There were five roundtables with randomly seated participants discussing specific issues such as definition of global health, critical challenges, emerging trends, global governance, funding and data need. During the discussion I raised three issues
o The need to focus on building systems instead of focusing on publications – needs in target countries are very far from number of scientific publications published based on research. Implementation and set up of long-term sustainable systems and infrastructure should be the aim of global health activities
o We shall consider dropping the categorization of countries based on economic measures. Global health should orientate toward problem solving and it does not matter whether the problem is in LIMC or a high-income country. This was based on example of a colleague form Barbados, where most of native population is rather low income, but due to many billionaires having property there the country as such is categorized as high income!
o Global health should open op from being an academic discipline to everyday life of people and include other sectors
Organizers will summarize the gathered ideas and propose an update of the above-mentioned publication. I signed up for receiving the new draft for comments before submitted for publication.
· A second pre-conference workshop I joined was on AI in global health and covered an overview of existing applications, methods mostly focusing on low- and middle-income countries. It was a very high-level workshop with general and also specific information through example of AI applications supporting selection of best treatment methods for cancer cure or respiratory disease. After workshop I contacted the two organizers, Dr. Katherine Robsky and bachelor student Saara Bidiwala explaining them our plan with a
new course as well as my other activities on this field (work in Olomouc, Czech Republic and guest editing a special volume of International journal of Public health on this subject) and they kindly offered collaboration an all issues. During the conference I joined two other sessions on AI issues discussing legal and data security subjects as well as applications to support health literacy in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania on case of cervical cancer prevention.
· There was a session on collaboration with China organized by Roger Glass, former director of Fogarty International Center of NIH USA and now president of Chinese Medical Academy. CMA is an organization coordinating collaboration of USA universities with Chinese partners both on research and students’ internships. Content wise this session was a bit of disappointment as it was in principle reporting of young students excited by their internships to rather aging audience at end of their careers. There was not really presented scientific topic related to individual collaborations.
· Another highlight of the conference was the plenary session on planetary health. Planetary health is a recent emerging trend in global health addressing the Anthropocene era and interaction of the Earth systems with biosphere and humans. Three keynote speakers highlighted different aspects of planetary health focusing on role of values, environmental activism and methodology. I contacted two of speakers, Carlos Faerron Guzman (Costa Rica-USA-Spain) and Cedric Colmar (France) and both promised to do an online lecture to our students within global health specialization.
· A traditional highlight of CUGH conferences is the “Great Global Health Debate” where two speakers argue and comment on a posted question. This year the question was “Be it resolved that Academia should be engaged in politics?”. In a vote before, about 98% of participants voted “yes” and the rest “against”. Nelson Sewankambo, president of Makerere University, Uganda was the debater arguing for and Judd Watson, chair of Department of International health of Bloomberg School of Public Health, John Hopkins University argued against. After 10+5 minutes to both debaters and public discussion the voting was repeated and reached a 50-50 score! The main argument made by Judd Watson was in distinguishing between individual academic approach and Academia as institution approach. He also enlisted historical examples when Academia was wrong in opinion.
In general, the conference was again a great experience and I can strongly recommend it to everybody interested for global health. It is a unique place where people of different professional, social and cultural experience meet, where clinical medicine and public health meet and always with timely themes. The next annual conference is April 9-12 in Washington DC, I expect abstract submission opening by end of May-June 2025.
Gabriel
Esbjerg, 28/02/2025