Traveling
Exhibit at Emory Highlights International Campaign to Increase Awareness
of Drug Shortages in Developing Countries
Emory University's
Rollins School of Public Health will host Doctors Without Borders' Access
to Essential Medicines EXPO on the Emory campus April 1-3. This traveling
exhibit, scheduled to visit over 22 American cities, was created by
the Nobel Prize-winning humanitarian organization (also known in French
as Medecins Sans Frontieres) as part of an international campaign to
increase awareness of the lack of access to life-saving drugs in developing
countries.
The Access to Essential Medicines
EXPO is open to the general public 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Wednesday,
April 1-3. Located on the parking area between the Rollins School of
Public Health and the Nell Hodgson Woodruff Nursing School on Clifton
Road, the EXPO should be hard to miss. The 48-foot long trailer will
be surrounded by flytraps - a real tool used for the prevention of sleeping
sickness. Parking is available in the Michael Street parking deck behind
the schools off Houston Mill Road.
On entering the exhibit,
each visitor spins a wheel to be assigned one of five specific diseases
that continue to kill millions of people in the developing world: AIDS;
kala azur, an almost invariably fatal parasitic disease; sleeping sickness;
malaria; and tuberculosis. As visitors move through the exhibit, they
read personal histories of people who share "their" and other diseases,
then learn about barriers to access for the world's poor. The last room
of the exhibit is a "pharmacy" where Doctors without Borders volunteers
offer visitors the treatment option available for their disease. Whichever
of the five diseases, treatment is severely limited, either because
the cost of treatment is too high (as for AIDS in developing nations)
or because research and development for new treatments for the other
largely neglected diseases has come to a standstill. Doctors Without
Borders doctors, nurses, and other field staff are available to answer
questions.
The tour of the exhibit can
be comfortably done in from 15 minutes to an hour, says Dean Surbey,
Associate Dean for Administrative and Finance in the Rollins School
of Public Health, and the coordinator of the visit.
Dr. James Curran, Dean of
the Rollins School of Public Health, notes that one third of the world's
population lacks access to the most basic and essential medicines, with
this figure rising to over half the population in the most impoverished
parts of Africa and Asia. He says "The Rollins School of Public Health
shares the concern of world health experts on this problem - which has
a much greater effect on the developed world than most people realize
- and we are very pleased to have Doctors Without Borders on our campus."
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