Stanley Foster, a public health practitioner who lived the story of smallpox eradication, opens the fifth annual Global Diseases: Voices from the Vanguard lecture series Jan. 26 at 5:30 p.m. in the Chapel.
In his lecture entitled “Our Global Village: Inequities, Social Justice and Empowerment of Communities,” Foster will share how he has devoted his life to combating preventable diseases among children.
Foster is a professor in the Emory University Rollins School of Public Health. After graduating from Williams College in 1955 and the University of Rochester School of Medicine in 1960, he spent two years as a Centers for Disease Control epidemic intelligence officer assigned to the Indian Health Service in Arizona.
While his main responsibility was to examine 10,000 school children per year for trachoma (25 percent were positive), he also had the opportunity to investigate other health emergencies as they arose including plague, rabies, measles, shigella, food poisoning, keratoconjuntivitis and rotavirus.
“We focused on prevention (immunization, malaria chemoprphylaxis of women); case management of the three priority killers of children (malaria, pneumonia and diarrhea) and in strengthening their preventive and curative systems,” he said.
In 1982, Foster received a master’s of public health from Emory University and has been teaching courses there such as policies in global health, strategies in international health, and evidence-based health planning since 1994.
