On Friday, American infectious disease expert Judd Walson moved from Karachi to Baltimore to lead Johns Hopkins’ Department of International Health. Speaking at a conference in the Global South, he spent his first hour on the job at Aga Khan University in Pakistan.
Given what he said about collaboration between European and American institutions and those in Africa and South Asia, this was a big deal.
Dr. Walson, keynote speaker at AKU’s paediatrics and child health department’s sixth annual research week, spoke via Zoom about the “incredible power imbalances” in global health decision-making.
Now the question is how to shift the focus of research and policymaking “away from that [which is] happening in the global north and being pushed on institutions in the global south,” he said, emphasising that more developed countries have no right to tell developing countries how to study disease.
Dr. Walson noted that the “strong bi-directional institutional partnerships” that have allowed him to have these discussions with AKU were essential in making this feasible.
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The topic of AKU’s Research Week this year, “thriving together, looking forward,” was inspired by his call for institutions in the United States and Europe to re-orient their approach to focus on more than just a child’s survival.
Actress and child protection activist Nadia Jamil was the keynote speaker and she said, “Children have a tendency to thrive. If you give them a chance, most of them will choose health.
AKU Paediatrics Chair Dr. Fyezah Jehan thanked the department teams for establishing rapport with families, echoing the sentiments of the other panellists.
“The process of writing a paper for publication can take a year or more. “However, it emerges as the first single data point that is collected off-campus with a vulnerable mother and child and one of our community health workers,” she said.
This is what we got out of it. We are finally seeing the fruits of labours put in over several decades ago. Baby mortality has been reduced by 35%, maternal mortality by 2.5 times, and child mortality by 50% at the field sites we serve as a result of our research’, added Dr Jehan.
Meanwhile, AKU’s medical school dean, Dr. Adil Haider, stressed the university’s commitment to improving maternal, infant, and child health through the advancement of medical science in its entirety. He concluded that the solution lay in “policy and clinical practise rooted in scientific research.”
Students and medical professionals from all around Karachi and beyond attended AKU’s Research Week to participate in one of 21 workshops on topics like statistical computing, metagenomics, neonatal ventilation, paediatric endocrinology, and decoding clinical genetic test results.
