Public health engineering in India

This spring, Professor David M. Gute traveled to India to give invited lectures at two institutions dedicated to health and engineering.

At the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute (THSTI), located in a suburb of Delhi, Professor Gute spoke on the topic “Public Health Engineering: Restoring the Synergy” to an audience of principal investigators from laboratories of relevance to human health and accompanying graduate students.

Gute delivered his second lecture on the subject of public health engineering at the Christian Medical College (CMC) in the south Indian city of Vellore, to an audience of Community Health and Bioengineering faculty and students.

In Vellore, he also toured the CMC Hospital, which treats 7,000 patients per day, and visited with scientists at the Wellcome Trust Laboratory, a leading clinical and public health research laboratory working to solve problems relating to gastrointestinal infection and function.

Finally, Gute witnessed environmental field sampling in the Vellore area with his host at CMC, Professor Venkata Raghava Mohan, M.D., of the Community Health Department, who holds a master’s degree in public health from Tufts. The visit allowed Gute to renew his relationship with Dr. Mohan that commenced while he was a student at Tufts.

The technique pictured is the bag-mediated filtration system (BMFS) currently being used for poliovirus environmental surveillance activities.