Child Health Ecosyndemics in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Rutgers Global Health Institute is hosting a guest faculty seminar at 2 p.m. on Friday, February 18, 2022, as part of its Viewpoints in Global Health Research: Guest Faculty Seminar Series. This online seminar will be presented by:

Gwenyth Lee
University of Michigan, Department of Epidemiology

Child Health Ecosyndemics in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
Worldwide, over 165 million children under age 5 experience stunted growth and suboptimal cognitive development because of exposure to infectious diseases and inadequate nutrition. While stunting has long been regarded as an intractable problem within global health, systems thinking has the potential to elucidate the negative synergistic interactions that drive growth faltering. This includes efforts to understand how undernutrition and infection interact biologically as well as efforts to understand how nutritional and infectious comorbidities co-occur in populations because of underlying social conditions.

The ongoing ‘‘gut microbiome, enteric infections, and child growth across a rural-urban gradient” (EcoMID) birth cohort studies investigate how enteric infections affect gut health, and the microbiome, among children living along a rural-urban gradient in coastal Ecuador. Studies from Ecuador and Peru also demonstrate how rapidly changing socioecological systems can simultaneously increase both nutritional and infectious exposures for young children in low- and middle-income countries, resulting in “ecosyndemic” vulnerability.

About the Presenter
Gwenyth Lee is a research assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Michigan. She served as a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa and received her master’s and Ph.D. degrees in international health from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. At the University of Michigan, she has built up a field platform for primary data collection in northern, coastal Ecuador.

Online via Zoom

Free and open to the public. For more events, visit the seminar series page on the Rutgers Global Health Institute website or explore the institute’s full online calendar.