School Notes: School of Public Health
January/February 2013

Global health competition at YSPH

More than 100 Yale undergraduate and graduate students from eight professional schools participated in the inaugural Global Health Case Competition in November where they presented recommendations to improve a deeply rooted and complex health problem in South Africa.

Each of the 20 student teams had less than a week to do research and formulate their responses in preparation for their presentation at the School of Public Health to a panel of 20 judges drawn from university faculty as well as public health practitioners and consultants. The winning six-member team was presented with a $3,000 check and will travel to Emory University in Atlanta early next year to represent Yale in an international competition.

Manual measures Latin American household food security

A manual for reliably measuring Latin American household food security has been developed by YSPH professor Rafael Pérez-Escamilla and colleagues to help international agencies and researchers in identifying high-risk groups, creating hunger maps, and targeting food security programs and resources. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) published the Latin American and Caribbean Household Food Security Scale manual. The evidence-based guidebook, written in Spanish, uses a 15-item standardized household food insecurity measurement scale adapted from the US Household Food Security Survey Module.

Researchers identify genetic variants linked to asthma

The first comprehensive sequencing study of the protein coding regions of the genome in a family with both asthmatic and non-asthmatic members has identified several variants that may contribute to the potentially debilitating condition. Scientists at the School of Public Health’s Center for Perinatal, Pediatric, and Environmental Epidemiology, led by Andrew DeWan, assistant professor in the Department of Chronic Disease Epidemiology, used a technique that sequenced only the small fraction of the genome that codes for proteins, and identified tens of thousands of variants in each subject’s genome. Focusing on family-specific variants, researchers determined which ones tracked with asthma in the family, and were then able to narrow this list down to four, based on how likely each specific variation would result in a change in the protein for which it coded. The researchers are seeking to determine the extent to which the well-documented increased risk of asthma to children of asthmatic mothers is due to genetic factors.