Hospital without borders

A. Our emphasis is really on training leaders both here and abroad to create a trans-generational approach to solving global health problems. We are making a major investment in educating both MGH clinicians as well as clinicians in our partner programs [at Mbarara University in Uganda, and the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa]. The real bottleneck to solving problems in global health is the human resource bottleneck.

Q. Why is Mass. General involved in this effort?

A. MGH hopes to define its third century by its global impact in reducing suffering in disenfranchised populations throughout the world.

Q. What do you say to people who argue that we have enough problems here at home?

A. When we talk about global health, we are talking about health globally, which includes health in our backyard.

Q. You mentioned that most medical schools today are involved in global health, in part, because their students want them to be. Why do you think young people today are so interested in global health?

A. Our students today have grown up with the Internet, with text messaging, with a sense of hyperconnectedness. The world becomes a much smaller place. When you combine the idealism [of youth] with the connectedness, there’s a real desire to engage and make a difference in very distant parts of the world.

Q. Your medical specialty is AIDS treatment. How did you end up in the push for better health care around the world?

A. I initially had ambitions to become a brain surgeon. I was shocked when I moved to Baltimore [to go to medical school at Johns Hopkins University] when I saw that people of wealth and people of extreme poverty could live one block from each other, and was very disheartened to learn that economic disparity is a major driver of disease and suffering. You can’t understand HIV without understanding the context in which it lives.

Q. You hosted a symposium last week in which you invited ideas from the public to help address global health problems. Why did you open it up like that?

A. You never know where the best ideas will come from. . . . The person who has inspired much of our treatment program in Uganda is a person named Elijah Musinguzi, who was the first person to receive free HIV treatment in rural Southwest Uganda. Elijah’s message to us was that if families don’t have the economic resources to cover the cost of transportation to pick up their pills, they won’t succeed. It really focused us on looking at poverty at the household level as a priority issue in HIV treatment response. KAREN WEINTRAUB

Interview was condensed and edited.

Karen Weintraub can be reached at karen@karenweintraub.com.