7-Jan-24

Earlier, I came across a TED-Talk by Sue Desmond-Hellmann, who gave public health a new viewpoint throughout her discussion. Sue Desmond-Hellmann is an oncologist, and CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She started off this talk with a short anecdote. Sue-Desmond always loved growing up in a big family when she was young, especially because every new baby meant choosing a new name, which was probably her favorite part. She would always be over the moon when it came time to name the next baby. But, she later discovered that it isn’t the same feeling everywhere in the world. In an area of Ethiopia, the parents of newborns postpone the naming of their baby by at least a month. Many will question that decision, since it’s normally an exciting occasion to choose a baby’s name. The reason behind this is that parents are afraid that their baby will die shortly after birth, and that they’ll be able to bear the loss better if the baby doesn’t have a name. Sue Desmond kept thinking about this issue, and learned that about 40% of deaths in children under five are neonatal, which means the babies are less than one month old. She decided to take a new approach on how to resolve this issue, called “Precision Public Health”. Precision treatment for any disease means precisely targeting the issue in a more practical way without harming external factors, such as  harming healthy breast cells while trying to tackle breast cancer cells. Sue Desmond also worked as an AIDS specialist for some time. About 17 million women in the world live with HIV/AIDS. Those women who get pregnant could pass on that disease to their babies if untreated, which would cause those babies death very early on. Antiretroviral therapy could significantly reduce that transmission of HIV. Initially, the hypothetical idea was that if they wanted to change that, they’d have to treat every pregnant woman in the world. This idea was obviously impractical. Instead, they decided to target areas where AIDS rates were the highest. Then, Sue Desmond brought up a new question. What if they found out that most babies were dying in a certain area because of a bacterial infection being transferred from the mom to the child? They would be able to prevent the transmission by providing the right medicine, which would be cheap and safe. These interventions would be able to help the healthcare workers know how to approach more situations like this, then get the right interventions in the right areas, which would further save lives. I was intrigued by this new viewpoint on public health because I never thought of public health in this visual lens before. The idea of being precise in public health could do wonders if more people knew about it, which I know is bound to happen someday.