Fighting Disease Overseas So We Don't Fight Disease Here

  My uncle, Lewis Robbins, had a long career with the U.S. Public Health Service.  His career spanned three phases - foreign epidemiology, cancer research, and preventative medicine.  In the 1940s and 50s, he was assigned to fight diseases in foreign countries.  The idea was to fight and defeat diseases overseas, so we didn’t have to fight them here.  Uncle Lewis’ house was filled with souvenirs from his early assignments – fighting sleeping sickness in Africa, malaria in Vietnam, an epidemic of blindness in Tibet.  His alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, has his biography on its webpage as a public health hero, and a large collection of his papers and notes in its library.

 

His second contribution was as head of cancer research for the USPHS.  He was lead author on a groundbreaking paper in 1959 identifying cigarette smoking a primary cause of lung cancer.  That work led to the Surgeon General’s warning placed on cigarette packages in 1963, allowing smokers to make an informed decision on whether to smoke.  His third major contribution was to develop a statistical system relating lifestyle choices (such as diet, exercise, safety and habits) to health outcomes, with the goal of keeping people healthy rather than trying to fix people after they are sick.

My niece also earned her doctorate at Johns Hopkins, and is working for the World Health Organization in France.  She is continuing my uncle’s work in the field of cancer epidemiology.

The World Health Organization plays a vital role in world health in both research and action.  WHO played a key role in ending the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, which grew at an exponential rate before being contained by courageous doctors from WHO.  WHO is also active in fighting cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes, emerging respiratory diseases, Covid, HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, dengue fever, and health emergencies due to natural disasters.  WHO collaborated with the US CDC in identifying the disease vector for the Zika virus, which causes babies to be born with severe brain damage.  Thanks to their efforts, the Zika virus has been kept away from the US, despite a brief outbreak in Florida.

In the new president’s first full day in office, he ordered that the United States withdraw from WHO.  The US currently provides 18% of the WHO budget, a trivial amount compared to most of our other categories of spending.  This is one way in which selfishness and isolation will only hurt us in the long run.
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/about/history/heroes-of-public-health/lewis-robbins-md-mph