When Dr. Zeba Rasmussen returned to Gilgit-Baltistan in northeast Pakistan two years ago, a man approached her in a bank.
“Don’t you remember the boy you treated for dysentery as an infant? Well, he’s recovering and in college now,” the man said to Rasmussen.
The boy was part of a group of children that Rasmussen treated, as part of her medical fellowship in infectious disease, for diarrhea and pneumonia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when both diseases were among the major causes of death for Pakistani children under age 5. “We saw dramatic changes just as a result of basic interventions,” Rasmussen, now a research fellow with the Fogarty International Center at the U.S. National Institutes of Health ( NIH ), said in an interview with America.gov.
Rasmussen, who was born in Karachi and moved to Washington at age 5, now has the opportunity to return to the region where she worked. She is part of an NIH project, “Water, Sanitation, Health and Hygiene Interventions in a Northern Pakistani Village,” that earned one of 27 grants announced in early September by the Pakistan-U.S. Science and Technology Cooperation Program.
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Rasmussen and her team at NIH will use their grant in partnership with Karakoram International University in Gilgit-Baltistan, the Aga Khan University in Karachi, and the University of Punjab in Lahore.
via Media-Newswire.com – Press Release Distribution – PR Agency.
Ismailimail 