Eva
Harris
"Infectious Disease Research in Latin America:
A Platform for Scientific
Capacity Building and
Social Mobilization"
October
30,
2006
|
|
Dr.
Eva Harris talks about using public health
research as a way to build communities in Latin America,
focusing on her experience with dengue fever. |
- Interview
with Professor Harris at the Institute for International
Studies
- New
York Times interview with Professor Harris (from
the Acumen Fund website)
- The
Sustainable Sciences Institute
Science,
Sustainability and South–South
Partnerships
By Karen Levy
Envision
a Bohr model of an atom, but replace the little electrons
zipping around the nucleus with ideas buzzing around the
head of a single person. Seemingly disconnected words and
ideas fly around, constantly jumping energy levels, yet
maintaining a constant orbit — DNA, social
movements, capacity-building, polymerase
chain reaction, south-south partnerships, dengue
hemorrhagic fever, plasma leakage, palm pilots, abuelitas, electrophoresis,reggaeton.
Somehow Dr. Eva Harris provides the central atomic core tying
all these ideas together, making their connections seem so
obvious that you wonder why others don’t link them
as she does.
And yet few could match the atomic energy levels that she
brings to her work. Dr. Harris, virologist at the UC Berkeley
School of Public Health, appears to have boundless energy
for practicing science within its social milieu. She blends
an enthusiasm for high caliber scientific research with a
passion for the people that her science serves. Her work
shows that the way one approaches academic questions can
in fact transcend the details of the questions themselves.
At
CLAS, Harris squeezed three lectures into one by speaking
at three times the speed of most professors. “I probably
should’ve chosen one, but I couldn’t help myself,” she
said. Her talk focused on the programs she has created over
the past 20 years to tackle dengue fever — a mosquito-borne
illness which has reached epidemic proportions in Latin America
since the mid-1990s — using biomedical research, information
technology and community participation.
Harris
knows how to talk to a diverse audience. “Don’t
get scared, it’s DNA, but it’s okay,” she
said as she quickly explained the fundamentals of molecular
biology. She then went on to discuss examples of the ways
in which her science has informed public health problems
in Nicaragua and in other countries in Latin America in real-time.
In
2000, she helped diagnose an outbreak of dengue fever in
Paraguay using the tools of molecular biology and working
with the Ministry of Health. “In Paraguay they were
like, ‘help!’” she recounted. “The
CDC was busy, Brazil was busy, so they said, ‘Eva,
can you come help us?’” Using molecular diagnostics,
she and the Paraguayan team were able to determine that the
dengue strains were coming in from Brazil via the border
bus stations. The Ministry of Health was then able to target
interventions to the specific locales where the epidemic
was entering the country and, by acting quickly, was able
to keep it from spreading.
Discussing
her work in Bolivia , she described the laboratory equipment
improvised by her colleagues there. In order to make a
centrifuge, they fused faucet widgets with a blender to
create the “Blenderfuge.” They also took an
old record player and transferred the circular motion to
horizontal motion in order to make a lab shaker. These researchers
were inspired by a concept that she used at the onset of
her career. She wrote a manual about how to carry out p olymerase
chain reactions — the fundamental tool of molecular
biology — in something akin to coffee cans. “What
you do in this country is buy a $10,000 machine. If you just
know you need to buy a machine, you’re stuck. But if
you understand the biophysical properties of DNA hybridization
and annealing… you can do what the machine does yourself.”
Ironically,
her colleagues in Nicaragua have now convinced her to also
do the reverse: to use high tech equipment in her community
work. They have piloted the use of geographic information
systems, palm pilots and fingerprint scanning technology
to systematize a large study of dengue virus in children. “I don’t know how many of you have
ever been to Managua , but there are no addresses,” she
said. “People say ‘go to where the Pepsi sign
was before the earthquake,’ which was in 1972. And
then you get there, and it looks different because it rained
the night before.” Technology has helped the researchers
find and then relocate the 4,000 children enrolled in the
study and keep track of their records.
Of
equal importance, using this equipment has enhanced the
computer literacy and confidence of the health workers
who have been trained to use it. “They learned to use
PDAs, and now they’re emailing; they’re doing
research on the web.” But it doesn’t stop there. “The
Nicaraguan government has asked us to help computerize entries
of newborns to help with their national vaccination schedules.
And Gates wants the Nicaraguans to train the Africans.”
 |
Dr.
Harris speaks with an audience member after the event. |
These
cascade effects of scientific capacity building are what
feed Harris’ passion. Instead of relying on traditional
approaches to combating dengue fever such as hanging posters
in health centers and deploying outsiders to spray people’s
homes, her group is engaging volunteer Barrio Brigades to
educate the community about the disease and how to control
it.
This
work has rallied the community beyond her expectations. “Dengue
is the banner, but in fact social mobilizing has been the
result,” she explained. “Gang members have now
become brigadistas, and the project is solving delinquency
problems, which in fact are bigger in this area than the
dengue problem. They are writing dengue reggaeton songs about
the larvas and the pupas. It’s truly
amazing to see what happens when you give them the information
and let them run with it.”
“What I’ve tried to do in my life and in my
work has been to take scientific capacities, knowledge and
tools, and bring them to the hands of people in Latin America
to use as they see fit,” she said.
Just
as the electrons surrounding the Bohr atom emit energy
by shifting from one orbital to another, Harris sustains
her energy level by switching back and forth between the
excitement of the molecular virology laboratory she runs
in Berkeley and her community development work. When asked
about how she manages to engage in this work, given the
intense pressures of academia, she laughed. “This
is my fun stuff. I also have my virology laboratory and
all of my other work that I do here as a real professor.” Yet
her scientific work is far from mundane. She is one of
the world’s
foremost experts on dengue fever and publishes in leading
scientific journals.
“You
have to be able to defend your existence in academe,” she
explained, “but I think it’s
really important to bring something out of that science that
actually benefits people, and to do that vocally and make
it explicit, instead of just making sure that your grant
is renewed.”
“In
the end, it’s important not just to publish
a paper but to put it into public health practice,” she
explained. “You actually do something beyond a research
project, which is really our theme.”
Eva
Harris is Associate Professor of Public Health at UC
Berkeley and the founder and president of the Sustainable
Sciences Institute (SSI). Professor Harris was awarded
the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship in 1997.
She gave a talk entitled “Infectious Disease Research
in Latin America : A Platform for Scientific Capacity Building
and Social Mobilization” at CLAS on October 30.
Karen
Levy is a doctoral student in Environmental Science,
Policy, and Management and has also completed her Masters
of Public Health in Epidemiology at Berkeley .
