Summer Institute 2008 Wraps Up
Facilitator Gilma Mantilla shows Viviana Ceron from Colombia how to access IRI's Data Library. Daniel Yeow/IRI
Fourteen professionals from nine countries recently completed an intensive two-week course on ways to use climate knowledge to make better decisions for health-care planning and control of climate sensitive diseases. They are the first graduates of the Summer Institute 2008 on Climate Information for Public Health organized by the IRI, the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) and the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. "We see this as the beginning of longer term partnerships, not only among the institutions but also among all the participants," said Madeleine Thomson, who runs IRI's Africa and Health programs and who was a principal organizer of the course. IRI's Director-General, Steve Zebiak, called the intersection of public health and climate "critical". "Climate events are exacting very heavy tolls on society, not only in terms of disasters such as epidemics, but also in terms of missed opportunities because we couldn't take advantage of things we know are likely to happen in climate," he said. The information exists, he continued, but often times isn't utilized because people who are in positions to make decisions or alter policy don't know it exists, don't know how it can help their sector, or don't have the technical resources to use or view it. "IRI is a research-based institution, but we define our work based on practice. We try to figure out with our stakeholders and partners how we can make new knowledge and new information usable and useful. It's very easy to produce numbers, graphs and maps, but the challenge is to have an instrument that is actually useful in day-to-day practice in decision making and policy making," he said. Part of the motivation behind the Summer Institute was to engage decision makers directly, not just through expert lectures, but also through focused discussions and practical training sessions. These sessions will introduce the participants to geographical information system (GIS)-based computational tools for analyzing epidemiological data with climate, population and environmental data.  "We envision the participants putting what they learn into practice by developing better surveillance systems that make full use of the power of climate information for epidemiological monitoring and risk assessment," said Marc Levy, who is CIESIN's Deputy Director. "Because the impact that climate has on health is always mediated by social structures and human behavior, it is important to develop a capacity for integrating climate information with socioeconomic data," he said. During the course, the students created disease risk maps, learned the pros and cons of using different data sources, including remotely sensed data and explored ways that climate forecasts can be relevant to epidemiology. (A full agenda and list of lecturers can be found here.) Participants spent the last day of the course giving final presentations about the data sets and analyses they worked on for their course assignments. They discussed the use of climate information in relation to malaria distribution and incidence in countries such as Colombia, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Niger. One participant, Tinni Seydou Halidou, will start a Climate Information for Public Health Bulletin upon his return to Niger. Another, Jari Vainio, from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, looked into the possibility of developing an early-warning system for yellow fever, which is transmitted by certain species of Aedes mosquitoes. "Yellow fever is considered so dangerous that if we find one case, an epidemic is declared," he said during his presentation. The learning experience will continue as the participants return to their home countries and try out some of the training examples in their own environments. "We hope to maintain longer term collaborations with all the participants as part of our effort to evaluate the course," said IRI researcher Judy Omumbo, one of Summer Institute's organizers and lecturers. Responses to the workshop have been positive, she said. "Already, we have been approached, by this year's participants, to replicate similar institutes in Spanish and French-speaking countries." Patrick Kinney, an environmental epidemiologist from the Mailman School of Public Health and another of the Summer Institute's lecturers, concurred. "I'm very happy with the way this has turned out and I look forward to one every year." Photo Credit: Daniel Yeow / IRI Relevant Links About the IRI
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