The University of Toronto announced today that it will be opening the country’s largest school devoted entirely to public health research and instruction at a time when epidemic ailments, from obesity and diabetes to pandemic flu, are sparking widespread concern.
Canadian epidemiologist Jack Mandel, who currently heads a similar school at Atlanta’s Emory University, has been named the first director of the university’s new Dalla Lana School of Public Health.
The school, which will begin operations in September, was made possible by a $20 million gift from health care facility magnate Paul Dalla Lana, chairman and founder of NorthWest Healthcare Properties REIT.
“I think this school is positioned to be one of the strongest in the world,” says Mandel, a Winnipeg native who has headed Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health since 2002.
“My goal is within five years (that) we’re a destination university for public health ..... among the top schools in the world.”
With the city’s 2003 SARS experience, in which Toronto Public Health officials played a key role, the field’s profile may be higher here than in other centres, Mandel concedes.
But SARS and persistent media reports on emerging pandemic threats like avian flu may confine the scope of public health in many minds to infectious disease control.
“I know a lot of people when they think of public health they think of infectious diseases, which remains an important part of the field,” says Mandel. “But public health is really all things to all people ..... and the non-infectious diseases are just as important to consider,” he says.
Diseases like Alzheimer’s, diabetes and obesity, heart disease and stroke are all verging on the epidemic and are just as much in the purview of public health as tuberculosis and AIDS, Mandel says.
Indeed, Mandel’s own work in Georgia has dealt largely with cancer, especially with the implementation of mass cancer screening programs aimed at early detection. Mandel led the first effort ever to document the benefits of widespread colorectal cancer screening and helped establish an ongoing study that will track 140,000 Georgians to seek genetic cancer markers in those who develop any form of the disease down the road.
He has also worked extensively on the environmental, occupational and lifestyle factors that contribute to a range of cancers.
The school will likely offer cross-disciplinary degrees with many U of T faculties, including nursing, medicine, dentistry and even business and law.
But it will also train its own cadres of health-care workers in such fields as epidemiology, bio-statistics behavioural sciences and environmental health.
U of T medical dean Dr. Cathy Whiteside says the school will integrate quickly into the wider public health community, becoming an important centre of research and information for health officials at the municipal, provincial and federal levels.
“This school will be part and parcel of the provincial and national strategy to focus on health promotion and disease prevention, including communicable diseases,” she says.
http://www.thestar.com/article/420017
Stumble It!