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Malaria expert treats students to his CDC experiences
Associate Professor of Public Health Kevin Griffith says global health is who he is.
Global health initiatives are certainly a large part of Griffith’s professional life—he brings a decade’s experience as a medical officer with the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) to his teaching at Fort Lewis College, and he continues to serve the President’s Malaria Initiative as a technical consultant.
“The faculty I really gravitated to as an undergrad student were people who were living their expertise and not just teaching from a book,” Griffith says. “That's what I try to do.”
Griffith started his career as a medical doctor specializing in family and preventative medicine, then moved into a role as a global health specialist working on infectious diseases with the CDC, where most of his focus has been on malaria, plague, and yellow fever.
“I was working on figuring out better ways to treat malaria and prevent it from happening in various countries,” he says. “Better ways to get medicines to the right places and better ways to diagnose. Essentially, how to allocate funding to best utilize those dollars.”
Malaria’s global past is rather checkered. It used to exist in the United States, particularly in the southeastern states, but it’s rarely found here any more. Griffith explains that we were able to eradicate the mosquito-borne disease from North America with a combination of pesticides, wetland draining, and quality housing. The mosquitos only bite at night, so the proliferation of air conditioning and screened windows has largely protected people in warm regions against disease-carrying mosquitos.
When malaria was eradicated in North America, people grew hopeful about global eradication. How did that effort go? “A horrible failure,” Griffith says succinctly. The attempt to achieve global eradication ran, and continues to run, into a combination of environmental, political, cultural, and economic factors. For instance, it’s resource-prohibitive to house an entire nation in air-conditioned homes when that nation’s population struggles to meet more basic needs.
While there are doctors on the ground treating individuals with malaria, Griffith’s focus is more on a population level—that’s where the “global health” part of his persona comes in.
So while eradication is still the ultimate goal, the work around malaria now focuses on limiting the disease’s spread and impact. Much of Griffith’s work has been in African countries, focused on the four main interventions for malaria: bed nets, spraying houses with pesticides, medicines for pregnant women, and improved diagnosis and treatment.
“We work in concert with the World Health Organization,” he says of his work with the CDC. “The WHO puts out recommendations about treatment. So we help review all the literature and all the different studies going on about drugs that work. Then we come up with a list of medicines to recommend.
“But it's more than just saying, these are the medicines you need to use,” he adds. “Countries have to buy them and train people on how to use them. So part of what I do is helping to go through all these countries' case management plans, as far as what drugs they use, do they make sense, and how can they better put the drugs into the appropriate places.”
Now that he’s an associate professor at FLC, Griffith no longer works full time with the CDC. But he continues to serve as a technical consultant with the President’s Malaria Initiative, which is co-implemented by the CDC and the United States Agency for International Development.
The specific angles he works to tackle malaria vary based on need at the Initiative. For instance, this past summer, the question he grappled with was what to do for children less than two months old.
“Long story short, if you're less than two months old, the WHO says don't even bother worrying about malaria,” Griffith says. “So we wondered, is that really true? My job was to go back through the literature and find out, do kids under two months actually get malaria? And the short answer is, yes, but it’s pretty rare.”
The reason malaria is so rare with young infants is related to fetal hemoglobin in the bloodstream. “Fetal hemoglobin is different than the hemoglobin we have as kids and adults,” he explains. “It binds the parasite, so you're not affected by it.”
His recommendation back to the WHO was that infant malaria is rare enough, on a population level, that it was not worth diverting resources to tackle the rare cases of malaria under two months of age. “There’s a tradeoff in lives lost,” he says. “We'd probably lose more older kids because they wouldn't be treated. It's a tough call. It comes down to the resources.”
These tough choices Griffith has had to make are precisely the sort of real-world experiences he strives to bring into his Public Health classes at FLC.
“Taking it back here, I bring this into coursework,” he says. “We talk about malaria, but we can also talk about various aspects of global health and disease. My interests, and most of my professional life, have been focused on global health and these vector-borne diseases. Having that background, I can apply it to a broader base of ideas.”
By pulling the interdisciplinary nature of Public Health into the classroom—the discipline relies on both quantitative and qualitative skills, politics, science, reading, writing, speaking, and synthesizing complex ideas—Griffith gets to enjoy watching the lights come on over students’ heads.
“When they’ve been struggling with a concept, and there’s a way to mathematically bring it all together? It’s like a penny drops,” he says. “They’re interested and engaged. It’s fun to see that.”
And while he continues to contribute to malaria efforts around the world, it’s teaching right here at FLC where Griffith feels at home.
“I’d always wanted to teach,” he says. “Even after I left clinical medicine and went to public health, I really thought I wanted to be in this sort of environment. I just didn’t want to do it without the experience. That’s why I wanted to go to the CDC. They do phenomenal work. But it’s all about the students. It sounds cheesy, but teaching is what I love to do.”