PHFI

Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) and the Indian Institutes of Public Health (IIPH celebrated PHFI Foundation Day on Thursday, April 9, 2015. Each year, the PHFI Foundation Day Lecture focuses on a public health area of great national and global importance, to be delivered by a distinguished leader in the field.

Thirty years since the first concerted public health response to HIV/AIDS – an issue on which considerable resources and efforts have been expended. Significant knowledge and expertise has been generated as a result of the global fight against HIV/AIDS, the application of which to health systems can help develop a more holistic approach to disease control and care delivery.

Professor James. W. Curran, Dean of the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University delivered the foundation day lecture. Speaking on “What Public Health has learned from HIV”, Prof Curran shared his experiences from decades of personal experience in HIV/AIDS research and policy translation, to provide insights on how health systems can be better equipped to address the double burden of infectious and chronic diseases.

Professor Curran (MD, MPH) previously led the HIV/AIDS Division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), attaining the rank of Assistant Surgeon General. He is a fellow of the American Epidemiologic Society, the American College of Preventive Medicine, and the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 1993. He was given the Surgeon General's Medal of Excellence in 1996 and the John Snow Award from the American Public Health Association in 2003.

The event was chaired by Mr J. V. R. Prasada Rao, the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy for AIDS in Asia Pacific and a member of PHFI’s Governing Body. It featured a panel discussion on Infectious Diseases in the 21st Century, especially relevant in the context of multiple infectious disease outbreaks in the last year across continents, many of them of zoonotic origin.

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