Baltimore to Host Global Health Conference

By Karen Buckelew

Organizers of a global public health conference this fall in Baltimore hope the event will draw attention to the urban health issues facing the city and its suburbs and give rise to new ideas for solutions.

The International Conference on Urban Health is co-hosted this year by the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and the Johns Hopkins University. The sixth annual conference, a function of the International Society for Urban Health, is expected to draw about 600 public health professionals from 40 countries to the Sheraton Baltimore City Center Hotel Oct. 31 through Nov. 2.

This year’s focus is technology, behavior and urban health, and Baltimore City Health Commissioner Dr. Joshua Sharfstein said he was curious to discover what technological innovations could be brought to bear on the city’s many urban health issues.

“I’m particularly interested in information technology and surveillance as a tool,” said Sharfstein, who will speak at the event. “There’re patient information databases [to] track people across different systems, as some cities have done.”

The city’s CitiStat program collects some health-related information, but doesn’t qualify as surveillance, a technique that could help target which populations seem particularly affected by Baltimore’s urban health problems, which include infectious disease, chronic diseases such as diabetes, housing issues and drug abuse.

Using state-of-the-art tools in urban health is a challenge because public funds for such purposes are limited, Sharfstein added.

“I think the trick is you have to find technologies that aren’t so expensive to implement that they’re prohibitive, but at the same time can have a big impact, really focus your efforts,” Sharfstein said.

Urban health is a growing niche in the public health field, said Dr. M. Chris Gibbons, president of the urban health society and associate director of the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute.

About 20 percent of Americans live in or around major metropolitan areas, and the number is growing, said Gibbons.

“In just a few years, more than 50 percent of the world population will be living in urbanized areas,” added Gibbons, also an assistant professor at the Hopkins medical school and Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Those populations face different health issues than residents of rural areas, including housing issues and the rapid spread of infectious diseases, he said.

“As urban areas grow, so do the problems that come as well as the benefits,” Gibbons said. “We need to focus our efforts to try to overcome the problems and maximize the benefits.”

Much of the urban health field consists of community outreach

efforts such as neighborhood clinics, free STD testing, housing assistance and counseling.

To encourage Baltimore outreach professionals to attend the conference, organizers are offering discounted admission and a special track of sessions just for them, said Mary Leach, secretary of the urban health society and a senior advisor to University of Maryland, Baltimore President David J. Ramsay.

Psychologist Ana Rodriguez-Halpin is one such outreach worker, assisting Spanish-speaking domestic violence victims and offenders at the East Baltimore nonprofit Adelante Familia, one of the conference’s community partners.

The event “is an exchange of ideas where people from other places that might be dealing with something similar can share with us how they’re approaching it,” she said. “It might be something we hadn’t thought of that we can put into practice here.”

Baltimore’s urban health network of services could have a lot to learn from other countries and cities, said Leach, who is sifting through about 400 research summaries from professionals wishing to present their work at the event.

“We think Baltimore is bad until you read about the rape and prostitution and treatment of women and so on in the world,” Leach said. “The developing world and the Third World have more in common than we sometimes realize. We have a lot to learn.”

(c) 2007 The Daily Record (Baltimore). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.