Poster session

Everyone come see the New Investigators poster session today! 2:15 in the Blue Room. Tea will be served.

(I had mine yesterday, so I can freely promote my colleagues without being accused of self-aggrandizement)

Pay No Mind to the Gap

Hans Rosling gave a great talk this morning. The website he founded (along with his son and daughter-in-law) is called Gapminder, which presumably refers to the gap between developed and developing countries.

Ironically, the thrust of his talk was about how we shouldn't be minding the gap so much. He showed how there's no clear division between "developed" and "developing" --- how mixed the countries of the world are in life expectancy, infant mortality, income, HIV infection. It's clearly more of a continuum.

He's a great speaker, and I see his point. But I do think most people who work in global health already understand it. The terms "developing" and "developed" are not perfect, but we need some kind of language to describe the differences between countries. I prefer Low, Middle, and High income myself.

Whatever language we choose, we're inevitably going to divide the world into categories in order to understand it. What Dr. Rosling didn't do today was propose an alternative set of categories.

Maybe that will be his talk next year.....

Can You Hear It?

IntraHealth International hosted a rockin' Tuesday eve party today, for a cause I completely believe in: Open Source. They had a contest where musical groups from all over the world recut, remixed, rearranged, and re-produced the same song. The winner was a group from West Africa called Studio Mali. Since the decision was made last night, the winners couldn't be on hand to receive their prize. But we all got to listen to some good music. The bolder among us even got out there and danced!

(By "bolder among us" I mean "someone other than me.")

The Gist of GIS

I went to a session on Geographic Information Systems, or GIS, this morning. (It occurs to me now, the name conveys absolutely nothing about what GIS is and does...but that's the subject of a different blog post). A very knowledgable guy named Dan De Vries ran the workshop. We used a program called Arc Explorer, which is one of about ten different free programs for mapping health data.

It was a useful session, and a powerful technology. But it's funny how quickly things change. Ten or fifteen years ago, the combination of GPS (the technique for getting latitude and longitudinal coordinates of a site) and GIS (taking those coordinates and layering them on a map) was seen as a powerful new tool for epidemiologists. And it still is. But today it's also a powerful tool for fourth graders.

How did something once so specialized become so universally available. As with so much else: Google.

Google Earth is basically a very user-friendly GIS. It may not have the statistical power of EpiInfo or Arc Explorer, but it allows lay people (and when it comes to epidemiology, I include myself in that category) participate in creating maps and layering data on them.

Does this mean epidemiologists will cease to exist? Obviously not. Access to technology is not the same as knowing how to use it correctly and effectively. Which is why I was in that session today --- to nudge myself slightly from the category "lay person" toward the category "expert."

Landing on Shoreham

Hi there folks. Just thought I would drop a quick blog post. I'm really excited to be here, looking forward to sharing experiences here in D.C.

A few words about me: I'm a second-year resident in internal medicine at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. I spent a year in Kenya doing research on HIV and --- hope you're not eating --- helminths, which are parasites that usually live in the GI tract and are related to tapeworms. I've also done research in Mali and DRC Congo, and traveled in Asia and South America.

Since the conference hasn't started just yet, there's not much to blog about. Stay tuned....