Faculty Profiles

Yuanli Liu
Heather Nelson
Stephen Buka
Barbara Burleigh
Eric Rimm
Karen Kuntz

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Center Highlights

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In 1969, the U.S. Surgeon General testified before Congress that "The time has come to close the book on infectious diseases." Yet since 1970 more than 30 new viral and bacterial diseases, including HIV/AIDS, SARS, Ebola, and hepatitis C, have emerged. Globally, infectious diseases now account for 32 percent of deaths; in sub-Saharan Africa, the figure is 68 percent. HIV/AIDS has driven life expectancy in five African countries below 40 years of age. While treatment, prevention, and training initiatives are having significant impact in some nations--including Senegal, Botswana, Nigeria, and Tanzania, where the School and the Harvard AIDS Institute have established partnerships--at least 40 million people are currently infected with the virus, and rates of new infection in many regions remain high.

The added threat of bioterrorism has heightened the need for laboratory research as well as training in public health preparedness for outbreaks and disasters at the national, state, and local levels. With a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2003 the School and Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government launched the National Preparedness Academy to help equip senior government officials to respond quickly and effectively to emergent infectious agents.

Public health's successes in preventing childhood deaths in many countries have led inevitably to a demographic transition in which people are living to older ages, and consequently now face an epidemic of chronic diseases. The health problems of both industrialized and most developing countries (with the exception of sub-Saharan Africa) are converging, with striking increases in cardiovascular disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes, depression, alcoholism, and asthma. Cardiovascular disease is now the major cause of mortality and morbidity worldwide, and chronic diseases have outpaced infectious diseases in most parts of the globe. Depression, already a leading cause of disability among women, is projected to become the world's second-largest health burden by 2020. And smoking-related deaths in the developing world now nearly equal those in industrialized countries, as an analysis in 2003 led by School faculty and an international research team has shown. As populations age, chronic illness will present an increasing burden to public health and health care systems.

Despite a steady increase in the number of motor vehicles on the road, advances in automotive engineering and traffic safety have reduced dramatically the percentage of drivers injured during the last half century. Yet as the Global Burden of Disease study shows, motor vehicle crashes are the single most rapidly rising cause of injury, projected to become the third-largest global health burden by 2020. These and other types of injury, notably those at the workplace and in the elderly, can largely be prevented and will continue to demand our attention. Far more difficult to avert will be injuries and deaths due to war and civil strife, to say nothing of earthquakes, famine, and other humanitarian emergencies, all of which take a toll upon human health that has been greatly underestimated.

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