Population health sciences honors 50th anniversary with symposium

Against the drama of the national debate on health care reform, a two-day symposium at UW–Madison will bring experts in evidence-based medicine and public health to shed light on some of the pressing issues in health care.

The symposium on Thursday and Friday, Aug. 27 and 28, celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Department of Population Health Sciences, which began in 1959 as the Department of Preventive Medicine.

“Our anniversary could not come at a more momentous time as it coincides with the challenge of overhauling our health care system, global pandemics of obesity and type 2 diabetes, and threats from emerging diseases such as swine flu,” says Javier Nieto, chair of the department. “Population health approaches to prevention are essential to tackling all these issues.”

The event will take place in the Microbial Sciences building, with keynote speeches in the Ebling Conference Center. Visit Population Health Sciences 50th Anniversary Symposium for details.

On Aug. 27, Kay Dickersin, director of the U.S. Cochrane Center at Johns Hopkins University, will give the keynote address on comparative effectiveness research at 8 a.m., followed by Shahrokh Javaheri, emeritus director of the VA Sleep Disorders Laboratory at the University of Cincinnati, who will give the John Rankin Memorial Lecture on sleep apnea and heart failure.

On Aug. 28, speakers include Dennis Fryback, emeritus professor of population health sciences, who will talk at 8 a.m. about evidence-based medicine as it relates to prostate cancer tests. He will be followed by Department of Population Health Sciences alumna Yukiko Asada, now associate professor of Community Health and Epidemiology at Dalhousie University, who will discuss myths and facts about the Canadian Health System.

The event also includes a poster session and breakout sessions on a number of public health themes. Several sections will focus on population health sciences work in Wisconsin and beyond. Sessions include “Health of Wisconsin: Using Data to Improve Population Health,” “Health Economics of Sin: Smoking, Gambling and Sloth,” and “H1N1 Influenza in Wisconsin.”

Others will focus on the department’s long history of evidence-based research. Some of these sessions include “Bump and Snorts in the Night: 20 Years of the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort,” “Good and Bad News about Diabetes” and “Reaching Out to Communities to Reduce Health Disparities in Wisconsin.”

Nieto notes that the department’s anniversary symposium also is a good opportunity to recognize the transformation of the former medical school into the School of Medicine and Public Health.