Author Archive
Sparking children’s interest in science
Tuesday, October 5, 2010, 7:33 am 2 Comments | Post a CommentTwo Saturdays ago, more than 500 students from ages 6 to 14 converged onto the UNC-Chapel Hill campus to build spaghetti bridges, program robots to push soda cans around a grid, cushion eggs to survive a fifteen-foot drop, and build towers out of a page of office paper and a piece of tape. These and other tasks were part of the North Carolina Science Challenge, part of the three-week 2010 NC Science Festival.
“With the Science Challenge, we hope to give kids what we call ‘the spark,’” says Al Childers, a parent, robotics enthusiast and entrepreneur who organized the all-day event. “We want to get kids started down the path of science. We hope that this will be something they can learn from, bring home, and do in their spare time.”
That spark was in evidence on Saturday, as participants worked to get a robot to turn 90 degrees just at the right moment, to combine parachutes and padding to an egg cradle and then drop it gently from a balcony, or to build a specific device from spare parts using only written instructions from a partner.
In the videos below, an elementary student tells us about the robotics event in her own words, and two middle school students describe the egg drop competition.
For Childers, the Science Challenge was a culmination of years of planning, partnering and pitching. Seven years ago, he and a small group of enthusiasts brought a robotics program to his son’s charter school. Kids worked together and competed with other teams to build robots and program them to perform increasingly complicated tasks.
“Coaching robotics, we discovered that kids really enjoy science in elementary and middle school — they thirst for it and want more of it,” Childers says.
Below, a LEGO robot runs a path through an obstacle course, driving under a bridge and laying down a ramp to move over a speed bump.
Childers and Eric Sherk, an IBM engineer, founded Magellan Science, a non-profit organization, to promote student involvement with science. For the North Carolina Science Challenge, they reached out to organizations from the North Carolina State College of Engineering to Odyssey of the Mind, an international education program.
Childers says he hopes there will be additional North Carolina Science Challenges in the future. In the meantime, he continues to coach robotics classes with his son and to design cheap, effective ways for teachers to encourage experimentation in their classrooms.
“We need kids to be prepared to use more science in their lives. What better thing can we do than help them put science in their skillset?”
Additional videos of the NC Science Challenge, including additional interviews with children and instructors, and demonstrations of the egg drop itself, are available here.
IntraHealth - a focus on health care worldwide
Sunday, April 25, 2010, 10:46 am No Comments | Post a CommentIntraHealth International is a nongovernmental organization that works to make it easier for people to access high quality health care throughout the developing world. IntraHealth is based in Chapel Hill, with offices and programs in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East.
On Thursday, April 22, IntraHealth celebrated its 30th anniversary. I spoke with Laura Hoemeke, IntraHealth’s director of strategic communications, about IntraHealth’s work and the challenges in providing health care in the developing world.
What are the problems that people working in health care face in the developing world?
Many health care problems faced in the developing world are the same issues faced throughout the world. People want access to good, affordable care, whether it’s for themselves, their children, or their parents. Health workers want access to the necessary knowledge, skills and materials to do a good job—and education to continue learning.
Much of our IntraHealth’s work focuses on basic family health care, or maternal and child care, which are very important issues around the world. Another interesting issue that everyone is looking at in the developing world is the emergence of chronic diseases, which we’ve traditionally associated with developed countries, but that are also becoming an issue throughout the world as people live longer and the population ages.
New technologies are also an issue. These can be as simple as a tool that allows a one-time injection that can be used for family planning, insulin injections, or other purposes. These are very simple things that because of either price issues or access haven’t gotten out. We think of technology that supports health workers will also have an impact in the future. For example, having a health worker do an online course to get education, or use technology to allow a health system better track data, so that not only a regional health system, but individual health workers, can use that data.
Can you define the term “health worker”? Why do you use this term rather than say, “doctors and nurses”?
For us, the term describes anyone who’s offering health care, or supporting the overall health system. In the states you don’t’ really say “I’ve got an appointment with my health care worker.” But worldwide a lot of health care is given not only by doctors and nurses, but by a whole cadre of health care workers. For us this term include doctors and nurses, but also technicians, hospital directors, or community health workers, who in many countries who are very vital in getting health care out to where people live.
What sort of projects is IntraHealth working on at the moment?
Our largest project is Capacity Plus. It’s a global project, supported by the U.S. government, that supports and strengthens health workers. This will include looking at things like planning for what a country needs in terms of its work force, strategies for motivating and maintaining health workers, and motivating and training health care workers.
We’re working on making a lasting difference. Training, for example, shouldn’t be a one-shot deal. We’d rather see training as continuing education, or something that helps each health worker better fit into the system where he or she is working.
So this project includes helping health workers develop planning, or help figure out not only how many doctors and nurses a country needs, but also find out what the performance of those health workers and how can that performance be optimized. We’re also doing lots of work with technology.
IntraHealth’s mission focuses on providing “sustainable and accessible” health care. Can you tell me why these issues are important in the developing world?
The word “accessible” means different things to different people. But for us, it means that health care should be there and be of good quality. I think too that this fits in with a broadening definition of what a health care worker is. In some countries, especially in rural areas, there aren’t hospitals or doctors that people are able to get to. So if you don’t bring health care closer to where people live and are, it isn’t accessible.
Making health care accessible also has connotations related to specific services and finances. So it can mean figuring out what services are that people need figuring out what people can pay and health care. In Rwanda, for example, we were very involved in supporting the country’s nationwide health care program called mutuelles. This program lets people buy a membership card every year, and that gives them access to a certain number of services. It’s been really successful, and in many areas, almost 90% of people are covered. That financial barrier is gone, so people aren’t afraid to go to the hospital when they are sick.
Making health care “sustainable” really plays on our desire to work with country governments to make sure that our health efforts and improvements have lasting benefits, rather than going away once our work ends. We work to ensure that whatever technologies or systems we have are developed in collaboration with a country’s ministry of health and that they then become part of that country’s policy framework. If you don’t do this kind of work with a local governments and in-country partners, none of it will be sustainable in the long run.
Read IntraHealth Global Health blog and follow IntraHealth on Twitter.
HSV challenges notions of infection, disease
Wednesday, March 31, 2010, 8:04 am No Comments | Post a CommentThere’s a virus that has infected one out of six Americans between the ages of 14 and 49. Closely related to the virus that causes chicken pox, this virus challenges the traditional way we think about infection and disease.
No treatment can eliminate the virus, though it can help reduce symptoms. Even without treatment the body’s immune system gets better at fighting and controlling the virus’ effects, though it too, can never eliminate the virus.
The virus can cause symptoms that range from irritating to agonizing. It rarely causes long-term harm to the body, but its psychological consequences can be devastating. Often, people who have the virus don’t even know that they are infected.
Scientists even hesitate to use the word “disease” with the virus, preferring the term “infection,” since diseases imply a distinct medical problem, with common signs, symptoms, and course of infection, all of which can be very different from person to person.
Despite all of this, the virus has been conspicuously absent from news reports, and people are often loath to talk about it.
The virus is herpes-simplex virus 2 (HSV-2), sometimes referred to simply as “herpes.” It is transmitted from person to person via sexual contact.
The latest statistics about herpes infection rates were released earlier in March by the 2010 CDC Sexually Transmitted Disease Conference. The American Social Health Association, a co-sponsor of the conference, is located in Research Triangle Park, and has been dealing with sexually transmitted diseases (or, to use the World Health Organization’s preferred term, sexually transmitted infections), since 1914.
The data about herpes come from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 2005-2008. The same study found that rates of herpes have roughly stabilized over the past decade. Herpes is especially high in women (21 percent), and black Americans (39 percent). Both biological (skin provides an effective barrier against the virus, and men have more of it) and social/economic reasons (black Americans are less likely to have good access to testing and treatment than white Americans) contribute to these disparities.
I worked at ASHA from 2000 to 2003 on the (now defunct) National Sexually Transmitted Disease and AIDS Hotlines. This was when automated phone trees were relatively rare, and before many people were comfortable using the Internet to gather information. The hotlines took thousands of calls a day and were open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The hotlines helped a lot of people, many of whom had been recently diagnosed with herpes. People know little about herpes or any other sexually transmitted infections. In the case of herpes, stigma and rumor make this very common, biologically mild virus, into something that is rare and deadly. Callers were in frequently in tears or spoke of suicide. I must have heard some variation of “no one will ever love me again” hundreds of times in my time on the hotlines.
Accurate information helped. Callers often in a state of panic when they are first diagnosed, often forgot or missed information from their health-care providers. At the hotlines we could answer people’s questions, and correct information about symptoms, transmission, and treatment at their convenience.
But I think it was just having an empathetic, nonjudgmental person who would listen to them that helped callers the most. In just a ten to 15-minute call, a person could often make the first steps toward coping with their infection.
Although the Internet has allowed many people to find information easily and anonymously, we’ve lost something without the human contact that a live hotline can provide.
So if you have been newly diagnosed with herpes, try to find that support from someone you trust. If you know someone who has, try to provide it.
ASHA continues to operate call centers on a smaller scale, advocate for greater awareness of sexually transmitted infections, and conduct research about STIs, and their consequences.
Correction: I previously wrote that the ASHA hotline is defunct. Although the hotline has lost federal funding, it continues to operate from private donations. The current hotline number is 919-361-8488 and provides information about STI testing, prevention, and treatment.
