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ene
gangarosa may be the internationally sought expert on waterborne
diseases in the family, but his wife, Rose, is the one who gives
a telling personal account of how the lack of safe water affects
women and children. Living in Pakistan, where Gene was working to
establish a medical research center in Lahore, she would visit in
the villages. These many years later, she remembers the faces of
children covered with flies, so reconciled to their torment they
wouldn’t wipe them away. She remembers the mothers who walked
for miles to get enough water to last for just one day. She remembers
the bodies of young children wasting away from diarrhea caused by
drinking contaminated water.
As Gene Gangarosa consulted with international
agencies throughout a long career, Rose Gangarosa was there with
her own children, helping, supporting, seeing—a witness to
the critical role water
plays in health. Now in partial retirement, Gene has her support
as they take another stand to do something about unsafe water and
in so doing improve health in the developing world.
The Gangarosas have made pledges to establish
two chairs at the Rollins School of Public Health (RSPH) that will
foster a growing expertise in safe water and sanitation at Emory.
They see these chairs as an investment in the future of the global
community and a way to enable the university to bring the best minds
in public health, nursing, medicine, business, and arts and sciences
to work on worldwide water challenges. They want to leverage the
work of the new Center for Global Safe Water at RSPH to build on
a network of partners such as CDC, CARE, USAID, and others, all
addressing water issues. (See
related story, Safer Water)
The Eugene J. Gangarosa Chair in Safe
Water and the Rose Salamone Gangarosa Chair in Environmental Health
are complementary. “We’re not going to be successful
without both water and sanitation pieces,” Gene Gangarosa
says. “Both are equally important. Sanitation is the right
hand of a two-handed operation.”
It was 1959 when Gene Gangarosa got his first exposure to water-transmitted
disease. On staff at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, he was assigned
to a US Army research team in Bangkok, where the Ministry of Health
had invited a multidisciplinary group of scientists to tackle a
newly emerging infectious disease. That disease was cholera, which
spread through water contaminated by human and animal fecal waste.
Gangarosa joined the CDC in the Epidemic
Intelligence Service in 1964, soon going on to lead the enteric
diseases activities of CDC’s Bacterial Diseases Division.
As he discovered more about cholera, Gangarosa’s growing expertise
was sought by ministries of health,
the World Bank, WHO, and others trying to build the infrastructure
to contain the epidemic that was spreading throughout Southeast
Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, and Africa—eventually
leaping an ocean to Latin America.
Joining the American University of
Beirut in 1978 as Dean of the faculty of health sciences, which
included the school of public health, Gangarosa continued his research
in cholera and water-transmitted diseases. A faculty colleague,
Professor Aftim Acra, got him interested in the possibility of disinfecting
contaminated water with sunlight. When unsettling conditions in
Lebanon forced Gangarosa’s return to the United States, he
brought the sunlight point-of-use strategy with him. “Sunlight
seemed the way to go,” Gangarosa remembers. However, he couldn’t
interest funding agencies in supporting research for sunlight disinfection
of water. Potential donors argued it went against cultural norms
in the developing world where people preferred cool, dark places
for water storage, and therefore, the sunlight disinfection strategy
seemed unsustainable to foundations supporting other water initiatives.
In 1982, Gangarosa became a professor
in preventive medicine at Emory School of Medicine and director
of its community health program—the very program that evolved
into the RSPH eight years later. While nurturing the public health
effort at Emory, Gangarosa discovered that his former colleagues
at CDC had a different point-of-use approach to water decontamination.
They were using a diluted solution of chlorine to disinfect water
in combination with a storage system that kept hands out of water
and prevented re-infection.
“I lucked out, being on the
ground floor to support CDC’s development of the Safe Water
System,” says Gangarosa. “Through the years, my involvement
enabled our students to link to the CDC pioneers to get firsthand
experiences in the field.”
Gangarosa, now professor emeritus of international health, has received
the highest awards given by CDC and Emory. He was awarded CDC’s
Medal of Excellence for distinguished scientific contributions and
Emory’s Thomas Jefferson Award for outstanding contribution
to the university. Every commencement, RSPH presents a service award
in his honor to the student who has demonstrated a creative approach
to solving public health problems and who shows promise for outstanding
service in the international arena.
But giving rather than receiving has
been the thrust of Gangarosa’s career. In the early days of
the public health program at Emory, he brought former CDC colleagues
into the classroom to give students the best lecturers and insights
the field has to offer.
Knowing the importance of hands-on experience, he gave students
access to global field experiences through the establishment of
the Eugene J. Gangarosa Scholarship Fund, which supports travel
for field research. Even in retirement, he wanted to do more. That’s
when he and Rose began discussing how they could contribute to public
health even beyond their life times.
They discussed the possibility of
making a major gift to RSPH to support water and sanitation, but
before they went further, they consulted with their four children.
“They all applauded our plans,” says Rose Gangarosa.
“A number of them have gone into related health and education
fields. They supported our decision 100 percent.”
Two of the Gangarosa children are
physicians—Ray, 90MPH, consults with Gene on food-borne diseases,
and Peggy is a pathologist in Florida. Their third child, Gene Gangarosa
Jr., is a teacher of English and history, and their youngest son,
Paul, 94MPH, is a computer whiz who is helping CDC develop computer-based
surveillance programs.
“We know that our contributions
represent only a few drops of water in an ocean of need,”
the Gangarosas wrote in a statement explaining their gift. “So
we look to others to help.” They believe that success in bringing
safe water to the developing world requires a multidisciplinary
approach, not just from traditional public health practitioners
but from educators, strategy makers, researchers, prevention specialists,
all of the disciplines well represented in the university.
“Every public health intervention
is affected by whether a mother has safe water,” Gangarosa
says. “For example, if you bring vaccination programs to children
who have access to safe water, you will be vaccinating children
who will survive. Many programs presume an access to safe water,
but it just isn’t so. We have to start with providing safe
water. It is a basic right, a basic need. The global community has
to mobilize in a way to make it possible.”
“I tell my students that when
we talk about health for all, it implies that those who have resources
and are making decisions must address the problems of those who
don’t,” Gangarosa says. He and Rose are applying that
lesson to their own stewardship, channeling the resources they have
toward improving the health of some of the more than a million people
who die each year because of water-transmitted diseases.
“We know we will never see the
smiles of those who benefit,” the Gangarosas conclude in their
gift statement, “but we will have the satisfaction of knowing
we are making a difference.”
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