The Washington State University Paul G. Allen School for Global Animal Health is working on both a global rabies effort and an assessment of global stunting – all through a multidisciplinary approach.
In the Washington Global Health Alliance Discovery Series lecture, “Global Health Through a Multidisciplinary Lens,” Guy Palmer, DVM, PhD, director of the WSU School for Global Animal Health, discussed how WSU is trying to get traction on these two global health issues. Palmer said WSU is running vaccination clinics in Tanzania to vaccinate dogs and to test hypotheses on how to make these clinics sustainable.
WSU is also working on demographic study of stunting in western Kenya with the University of Washington. In this project, UW and WSU would like to know why in some households children are growing well and, in others, they are being stunted in the first 1,000 days of life – usually a combination of malnutrition and diarrheal diseases caused by contaminated water. Palmer said the team from UW and WSU are looking in-depth at 1,600 households to determine where the vulnerabilities are.