“I am the first child of my parents. I have a small brother at home. If the first child were a son, my parents might be happy ... but I am a daughter. I complete all the household tasks, go to school, again do the household activities in the evening … my parents do not give value or recognition to me.”
Stanford Assistant Professor of Medicine Marcella Alsan often refers to this comment by a 15-year-old girl from Nepal when she talks about how the division of labor among men and women starts at a young age in the developing world.
“Anecdotally, girls must sacrifice their education to help out with domestic tasks, including taking care of children, a job that becomes more onerous if their younger siblings are ill,” said, Alsan, a core faculty member at the Center for Health Policy/Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research (CHP/PCOR) within the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies, and the Department of Medicine.
More than 100 million girls worldwide fail to complete secondary school, despite research that shows a mother’s literacy is the most robust predictor of child survival. So Alsan is analyzing whether medical interventions in children under 5 tend to lead their older sisters back to school.
She is one of two winners of this year’s Rosenkranz Prize for Health Care Research in Developing Countries, awarded by CHP/PCOR to promising young Stanford researchers.
Her Stanford Department of Medicine colleague, Jason Andrews, is the other recipient of the $100,000 prize given to young Stanford researchers to investigate ways to improve access to health care in developing countries.
Andrews is looking at cheap, effective diagnostic tools for infectious diseases, while Alsan is researching how older girls in poorer countries are impacted by the health of their younger siblings.
“My proposed work lays the foundation for a more comprehensive understanding of how illness in households and early child health interventions impact a critical determinant of human development: an older girl’s education,” she said.
Alsan, the only infectious-disease trained economist in the United States, said Stanford is the ideal place to carry out her interdisciplinary global health research.
“I am humbled and honored to receive this prize, since Dr. Rosenkranz has done so much for women’s health worldwide,” she said.
Alsan – an MD with a specialty in infectious disease who has a PhD in economics from Harvard – said she intends to estimate the impact that illnesses in under-5 children have on older girls’ schooling using econometric tools.
She will compile data from more than 100 Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) covering nearly 4 million children living in low- and middle-income countries.
The surveys ask about episodes of diarrhea, pneumonia and fever in children under 5 and record data on literacy and school enrollment for every child in the household.
Alsan also intends to collaborate with partners in sub-Saharan Africa to study the gendered effect of household illness on time use, using culturally appropriate questionnaires.
Douglas K. Owens, a Stanford professor of medicine and director of CHP/PCOR, called Alsan’s work “groundbreaking.”
“Although training is critical, more importantly, her work to date shows a degree of innovation, creativity and rigor that led us to conclude she was likely to become one of the top investigators in her field worldwide,” he said.
Low-Cost Diagnostic Tools
Andrews, also an assistant professor of medicine, has been working on ways to bring low-cost diagnostic tools to impoverished communities that bear the brunt of disability and death from infectious disease.
“I began working in rural Nepal as an undergraduate student and as a medical student founded a nonprofit organization that provides free medical services in one of the most remote and impoverished parts of the country,” Andrews said. “As I became a primary physician, and then an infectious diseases specialist, one of the consistent and critical challenges I encountered in this setting was routine diagnosis of infectious disease.”
He said those routine diagnostics were typically hindered by lack of electricity, limited laboratory infrastructure and lack of trained lab personnel.
“In my experiences working throughout rural Nepal – and in India, South Africa, Brazil, Peru and Ethiopia – I found these challenges to be common across rural resource-limited settings,” said Andrews, who founded a nonprofit Nyaya Health – recently renamed Possible Health – which provides modern, low-cost healthcare to rural Nepal.
Andrews has been collaborating with engineers to develop an electricity-free, culture-based incubation and identification system for typhoid; low-cost portable microscopes to detect parasitic worm infections; and most recently an easy-to-use molecular diagnostic tool that does not require electricity.
“The motivation for these projects was not to develop fundamentally new diagnostic approaches, but rather to find simple, low-cost means to make established laboratory techniques affordable and accessible,” he said.
The Rosenkranz Prize will allow him to continue to develop a simple, rapid, molecular diagnostic for cholera that is 10 times more sensitive than the tests that are currently available. The diagnostic tool uses paper for DNA extraction, in contrast to traditional approaches that rely on expensive instruments requiring electricity and maintenance.“We then perform isothermal amplification heated by a reusable, solar-heated, phase-change material,” Andrews said, adding that the entire process is completed in less than 20 minutes and can be performed by anyone with minimal training.
Andrews will enroll 250 patients with suspected cases of cholera in Nepal, using the new diagnostic tools and adapting as many local supplies as possible.
Andrews also intends to establish and curate a website to gather open-source ideas and evidence on diagnostic techniques for use in the developing world.
“Stanford is one of the world’s greatest hubs for innovation and information sharing as pertains to science and technology and is an ideal home for this venture,” he said.
In the current scientific climate, most National Institutes of Health grants go to established researchers. The Rosenkranz Prize aims to stimulate the work of Stanford’s bright young stars – researchers who have the desire to improve health care in the developing world, but lack the resources.
The award’s namesake, George Rosenkranz, first synthesized cortisone in 1951, and later progestin, the active ingredient in oral birth control pills. He went on to establish the Mexican National Institute for Genomic Medicine, and his family created the Rosenkranz Prize in 2009.
The award embodies Dr. Rosenkranz’s belief that young scientists hold the curiosity and drive necessary to find alternative solutions to longstanding health-care dilemmas.
“As in past years, the competition was extremely tough,” said Grant Miller, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and associate professor of medicine who chaired the prize committee this year.
“It’s exciting to see all of the truly innovative global health research being done by junior scholars at Stanford,” he said. “Both Jason and Marcella really exemplify this – and the legacy of George Rosenkranz.”
