Global Health Perspectives with Derek Yach

Konstantinos E. Farsalinos, M.D., is a senior researcher at the Department of Pharmacy-University of Patras and the school of Public Health-University of West Attica. He is also an adjunct professor at King AbdulAziz University in Jeddah. He has been conducting laboratory and clinical research on e-cigarettes as a principal investigator since 2011. Examples of his work include the first study on the cytotoxic effects of e-cigarette vapor on cultured cells and the immediate effects of e-cigarette use on cardiac function and coronary circulation. As of late 2019, he has published more than 80 studies and articles in international peer-reviewed scientific journals about tobacco harm reduction. He has been recognized as one of the world's most influential researchers of the past decade by Web of Science, receiving the Highly Cited Researcher 2019 recognition.

Click here for more about Konstantinos' recent work: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2040622320935765

Francois Millard is Senior Vice President at Vitality Group, a member of South Africa-based Discovery Holdings Limited. He leads Vitality's sciences agenda and the practical application thereof. Areas of current focus includes Covid-19 resilience linked to behavioral risks, lifelong health & financial security, corporate health and sustainability, along with the application of data, design, technology, incentives, behavioral economics to improve outcomes in these dimensions. The work is central to the Discovery Group’s Shared-Value Insurance model. He is a Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in London, the Society of Actuaries in the US and a Member of the American Academy of Actuaries.

Click here to learn more about smoking risks from the perspective of insurers: https://www.oliverwyman.com/content/dam/oliver-wyman/v2/publications/2019/November/insurer-perspectives-on-smoking-risks.pdf

George is a Mechanical Engineer at Cambridge Design Partnership and has experience across a wide range of projects, from consumer goods through to medical and performance-critical drug delivery devices. He takes a user-centric approach to his research and design and was a named Red Dot Design Award winner for CDP’s First Response Monitor, a wearable connected medical device for the monitoring of patient vital signs.

He has a passion for sustainable design and is a strong advocate of taking a systems-approach all design challenges, but especially sustainability-based problems.

He holds a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering from Imperial College London and has previously worked at Rolls-Royce as a systems design and integration engineer

In this episode, Derek Yach addresses the significance of World No Tobacco Day and how the day affected him personally while living in South Africa many years ago. On World No Tobacco Day we are reminded that smoking remains the largest single preventable cause of death.

Dr. Jed Rose is the President and CEO of the Rose Research Center. He is also Director of the Duke Center for Smoking Cessation and a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University Medical Center. Dr. Jed Rose began work in the area of tobacco addiction research as a NIMH Postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at Los Angeles. A main focus of his research program has been the elucidation of the role of sensorimotor cues and the CNS effects of nicotine in reinforcing cigarette smoking behavior. He is co-inventor of the nicotine skin patch and other treatments for smoking cessation. His primary research goals are to elucidate the biological mechanisms underlying tobacco addiction and to promote the development of more effective treatments.

Dyborn Chibonga is the regional head for Malawi and Mozambique at the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), an alliance aimed to catalyze and sustain inclusive agriculture transformation for smallholder farmers in Africa.

He has more than 25 years of experience advocating for product diversification away from tobacco into other cash and food crops, as well as policy and regulatory reforms that promote food security and rural development.

Mr. Chibonga previously served as the CEO of the National Smallholder Farmers’ Association of Malawi (NASFAM) for 18 years. During this time, Mr. Chibonga grew the organization to more than 165,000 farmers, making it the largest smallholder-owned membership organization in Malawi. He transformed NASFAM from a small association into a sustainable business and a model for other countries to follow. Under Mr. Chibonga’s leadership, NASFAM established the Agricultural Commodity Exchange for Africa, a platform designed to encourage competitive bidding processes for smallholder farmers when selling their crops.

Mr. Chibonga is from Malawi and provides strategic guidance as a member of the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World's board of directors. Mr. Chibonga is also a board member of the Cooperative Insurance Company of Malawi, the Jubilee University Council and the Commercial Agriculture Support Services. He holds a BS degree from the Bunda College of Agriculture at the University of Malawi and an MSc in landscape ecology design & maintenance from the University of London, where he also holds a master’s certificate in NGO management.

Melonie Kastman has worked for 20+ years in film, producing television commercials for major brands and networks, partnered with dozens of the top ad agencies and production companies to film around the globe (list available upon request)

Moving into the documentary world, most notably directed "Road to Change" inside the life of an African President, filming with then President of Sierra Leone H.E. Ernest Bai Koroma as he worked to rebuild his country after a violent civil war. Other clients include African Leadership Academy, The American Cancer Society, Doctors Without Borders, Ronald McDonald House Charities, UN Department of Peacekeeping, Crow Collection of Asian Arts, The Greenbelt Movement: filmed with Nobel Peace Prize recipient Wanguri Maathi, Foundation for a SmokeFreeWorld, The Carlyle Group, World Food Program, USAID, Themiis Institute, and the Conrad Foundation at NASA .

Most currently Melonie followed the UN Ebola Emergency Response team in Democratic Republic of Congo as they coordinated efforts to curb the 2nd largest Ebola epidemic, located in an area of high insecurity, conflict and facing rebel attacks o health care workers ad facilities.

Ongoing Projects: For the launch of The Foundation for SmokeFreeWorld, an NGO focused on ending smoking in a generation. Melonie filmed a short documentary "The True Cost of a Cigarette" which depicts the unintended consequences of decline in demand for small shareholder tobacco farmers in developing nations. We continue to film and follow their important story across the globe.

First feature length documentary (currently in post production) "...until there is peace" follows a special group of Peacekeepers known as the Force Intervention Brigade as they go about their work, not only protecting civilians but also working to eliminate the rebel forces, in the largest and most dangerous UN Peacekeeping mission in the world, MONUSCO in The Democratic Republic of Congo.

Gerry Stimson is a British public health social scientist, emeritus professor at Imperial College London from 2004, and a former honorary professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine from 2017. Stimson has over 220 scientific publications mainly on social and health aspects of illicit drug use, including HIV infection. He has sat on numerous editorial boards including AIDS, Addiction, and European Addiction Research, and with Tim Rhodes he was the co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Drug Policy from 2000 to 2016. He is one of the global leaders for research on and later advocacy for harm reduction. From 2010 he has focused on tobacco harm reduction.

Since 2010 Stimson has focused on how harm reduction can be applied to reduce the toll of death, disease and disability caused by tobacco use. He is now co-director of the Global State of Tobacco Harm Reduction (GSTHR), a project supported by the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World. The GSTHR maps the availability, use and regulation of safer nicotine products and the public health potential of tobacco harm reduction worldwide. The GSTHR publishes a biennial report (new edition forthcoming November 2020) and a website which offers users tools to research and compare country-level data on safer nicotine products. In early 2020, the GSTHR team published 'Tobacco harm reduction and the right to health', an introductory briefing paper to support tobacco harm reduction advocacy.

https://gsthr.org/

https://gsthr.org/report/full-report

https://gsthr.org/report/2020-briefing-paper

Tikki joined the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy after 13 years at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland as Director of its Research Policy & Cooperation department. In this capacity, he worked with countries to strengthen their national health research systems, developed mechanisms and initiatives to improve the efficiency and transparency of global health research, and helped formulate an Organization-wide research policy.

After following a traditional academic career path in Malaysia, his experience at the WHO convinced him that the generation of knowledge must be accompanied by its translation and utilization, and the bridging of the ‘know-do’ gap into effective and sustainable public policies in order to improve the health of humankind, especially in the developing world. In turn, and in order to ensure its effective implementation, effective public policies must exist in a climate of good global governance as health in a globalized world is increasingly becoming a trans-national issue which knows no borders.

Tikki’s main research and academic interests are in infectious diseases, the impact of genomics on public health, global health governance, national health research systems, knowledge translation, research transparency & accountability, and the use of evidence in health policy development. In these areas he has published more than 200 scientific articles and 12 books, edited volumes and reports. This includes several major WHO reports, includingGenomics and World Health (2002), the World Report on Knowledge for Better Health (2004) and a History of Research in WHO (2010). His involvement with the LKY School of Public Policy began in 2009 through the ST Lee Project on Global Health Governance.

Tikki holds a BSC (Honours) and PhD degrees from the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia in the fields of biochemistry and microbiology/immunology. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists (UK), American Academy of Microbiology (USA), Institute of Biology (UK) and the Academy of Medicine of Malaysia. He was the Founding Editor of Health Research Policy & Systems and the Asia-Pacific Journal of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology.

Dr Glover is a Māori (New Zealand indigenous) behavioral scientist with over 27 years of experience in tobacco control and over 100 scientific papers. She is the Director of the internationally-focused Centre of Research Excellence on Indigenous Sovereignty & Smoking. Much of her work as a Professor of Public Health has concentrated on designing pragmatic solutions to reduce smoking, particularly smoking while pregnant. She is well known for her compassionate insight and advocacy on tobacco harm reduction, which resulted in her being appointed as Tobacco Section Editor for the international Harm Reduction Journal. In 2017, Marewa was a Finalist in the Women of Influence Awards and in 2019, in recognition of her contribution to society she was named one of three finalists in the New Zealander of The Year Awards.