Oct. 31--Mangoes are Haiti's largest export, but the country imports mango juice.
"It doesn't make sense," said Gergens Polynice, a UW-Madison research assistant from Haiti. "How can we process the foods in Haiti and take advantage of the local market?"
Polynice and other campus researchers will explore that question in one of eight projects to win grants through the university's new Global Health Institute, launched Thursday at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.
UW-Madison for years has sent health sciences students and doctors to foreign countries to learn about global health problems and address them. Now other parts of campus are getting more involved in studying the social, political, economic and structural barriers that make such problems so hard to solve.
"We need to embrace the complexity and understand interdependencies," said Jonathan Patz, an environmental studies professor and director of the institute. "If we don't understand these interdependencies, we are bound to create more problems when we try to solve a problem."
Dr. Claire Wendland is working on a problem that certainly is complex: High rates of HIV, unplanned pregnancies and school dropouts among girls in Malawi.
Wendland's team will try to help girls deal with the wide range of issues involved, from school fees and the condition of school uniforms to access to land and agricultural skills.
"Factors like these actually have a lot to do with young girls' reproductive choices," said Wendland, a medical anthropologist.
Dr. Leonelo Bautisa's team will try to help more people get treated for high blood pressure in Latin America. Of people there with the condition, only 19 percent of people have it under control, compared with 61 percent in the U.S., he said.
A group led by Lewis Gilbert will use Twitter filters, citizen group reports, mobile applications and other data to track diseases in wildlife that can spread to people.
West Nile virus, SARS, bird flu and swine flu have emerged in recent years, and closer wildlife surveillance could better identify new threats.
"We're trying to design upstream warning systems," said Gilbert, associate director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
Jeremy Foltz, an associate professor of agricultural and applied economics, wonders if Mali's success in producing more grains can continue.
The African country grows nearly twice as much maize, millet, rice and sorghum per person as it did a decade ago, Foltz said. But a peanut boom crashed, and fragile soil could threaten the future of other crops, he said.
"Is this increase (in grain production) sustainable?" Foltz asked. "We hope so, but there's reason to worry."
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