UK researcher wins 2012 Gairdner Global Health Award

Abstract

The past few months have been rather special for Brian Greenwood. A Knighthood in the 2012 New Year honours in January was followed in early March by an honorary Fellowship of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. And now, to crown it all, Greenwood has been named the winner of the Canadian Gairdner Foundation’s 2012 Global Health Award for his “contributions to signifi cantly reducing mortality in children due to meningitis and acute respiratory infection and for contributions to malaria prevention”. Even for an award as prestigious as the Gairdner, a decisive contribution in the fi ght against any one of meningitis, pneumonia, or malaria—three of the biggest killers in the developing world— would probably be enough to see a nominee join the illustrious ranks of past winners. So how has Greenwood managed to fi nd the time in his career to change the face of all three? The answer, Greenwood reveals, “lies partly in the fact that 40 years ago there were so few people involved in global health that one had to be a jack of all trades, even if a master of none. Thus, in my career I have been variously an adult physician, paediatrician, immunologist, public health physician and even, for 1 year, a psychiatrist”. It was this “ability to be able spread one’s wings wide” that was one of the attractions of working in Africa, says Greenwood. Greenwood arrived in Zaria in northern Nigeria in 1970 to help establish a new medical school at Ahmadu Bello University, under the guidance of Eldryd Parry. A new school meant new ideas, and a determination to sweep away “the old fashioned, even then, hold of limited biomedicine and the foolish aspirations to be like Bonn, Boston, and Bart’s”, Parry recalls. For Greenwood, a clinician by training, this meant taking his investigative work into the fi eld, and to keep fully occupied throughout the year he and his colleagues worked on malaria in the rainy season and meningitis and pneumonia during the dry season, when the arid Harmattan wind stoked periodic epidemics of both diseases.