Infectious disease expert works to ban landmines, fight tuberculosis and AIDS
Since the 1980s, infectious disease specialist Anne Goldfeld has worked to ban landmines, treat victims of tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS in Cambodia and Ethiopia, and conduct research aimed at eradicating those diseases. A professor in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Harvard School of Public Health and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, Goldfeld was profiled as part of WBUR’s “Visionaries” series on February 1, 2013.
Goldfeld co-founded the U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines and gave the first testimony before Congress calling for international action on landmines. Also, after a chance meeting with Angelina Jolie on a flight to Cambodia, Goldfeld visited a hospital in Phnom Penh with the actress—“a terrible place…where patients were brought to die, basically,” Goldfeld told WBUR. After that visit, Jolie and her husband Brad Pitt funded a new children’s health and education center in Phnom Penh to treat kids affected by HIV or tuberculosis. Goldfeld and Jolie plan to open a similar center in Ethiopia.