Health program among nation's best

NEWS NOTEBOOK

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Posted: 3/6/08

The University's health and physical education program is one of less than 24 programs in the country to receive full national recognition from the National Association for Sport and Physical Education.

The association's commendation signifies program graduates are meeting the national standards in teacher education and have the knowledge, skills and dispositions to teach children successfully.

It is a measure of graduates' capabilities, as opposed to program offerings and facilities or faculty qualifications.

NASPE recognition is dependent on accreditation by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, the professional accrediting organization for schools, colleges and departments of education in the U.S.

The University's program, based in the College of Education's department of kinesiology, underwent its most recent review last fall. It has been accredited by NCATE since 2002.

The Georgia Professional Standards Commission also reaccredited the program in 2007.

Speaker advocates fighting diseases

Scourges, such as river blindness, have the power to transform thriving agricultural villages into impoverished ghost towns.

Frank O. Richards, a Carter Center scientist whose mass drug treatment programs have saved millions of people from afflictions in Africa and Latin America, will bring 25 years of experience and insight to the University on March 18, when he will be featured in the "Global Diseases: Voices from the Vanguard" lecture series.

Although campaigns aimed at controlling or eradicating one disease at a time have been beneficial, Richards contends integrating public health services can save more lives and keep local economies healthier. Richards will make his case in a lecture called "Bundling Grassroots Services to Battle Neglected Diseases" at 6 p.m. in the Chapel.

Richards, originally trained as a pediatric infectious disease specialist, now directs malaria, river blindness, lymphatic filariasis and schistosomiasis programs for The Carter Center in Atlanta. The center is a major global player in efforts to reduce or eliminate infectious scourges that strike poor people in developing countries.

In his talk, Richards will describe how partnerships and "bundling" of community-based services are reducing poverty and disease in Nigeria - a country he says provides evidence of "progress and hope."

Pulling together isn't always easy for public health programs, according to Daniel G. Colley, director of the University's Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases and a leading expert on schistosomiasis and other parasitic diseases.

"Obstacles and challenges are many, and Dr. Frank Richards is tackling these challenges in Nigeria, implementing creative strategies that we hope will pave the way for effective integration of programs in other places," Colley said. "All global health experts now agree with the bundling concept for delivering disease interventions, but Dr. Richards is one of the very, very few who are actually doing it - and on some of the most debilitating and disfiguring diseases out there. Only by really trying to implement all these strategies in an integrated way will we learn if and how this is possible."

Richards began his public health career as an epidemiology fellow at the Centers for Disease Control, where he spent 22 years investigating disease outbreaks, leading and monitoring intervention programs and developing educational and communication tools now used around the globe. He has been with The Carter Center since 1996.

- University News Service