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The sign public well being achievement of the twentieth century was the rise of the typical human life span. Now, as that achievement helps increase the proportion of the aged world wide, what as soon as appeared an unalloyed blessing is just too typically thought to be a burden — a monetary burden, a well being care burden, even a social burden.
“It’s nuts,” mentioned Dr. Linda P. Fried, an epidemiologist and geriatrician who’s dean of the Mailman Faculty of Public Well being at Columbia College. “To imagine defeat from what each certainly one of us as people desires suggests we’re not asking the appropriate questions.”
Findings from the science of growing older, Dr. Fried mentioned, ought to “reframe our understanding of the advantages and prices of growing older.”
From her perch at Mailman, a place she has held for 4 years, Dr. Fried is pushing college students, professors and a wider viewers to ask the appropriate questions and ponder the appropriate insurance policies for dealing with an growing older world inhabitants.
Dr. Fried’s mandate is to steer a faculty that can give a brand new technology the instruments to take care of world challenges to public well being, together with environmental degradation, climbing well being care prices and the stress of speedy urbanization. However she believes that analysis on growing older and well being modifications “throughout the life course” are central to designing options to public well being issues within the twenty first century.
The Mailman Faculty is newly energized, with enrollment within the grasp’s and doctoral applications up 26 p.c over the past 4 years, and grants from the Nationwide Institutes of Well being up 12 p.c in 2011 — a yr by which the general N.I.H. price range declined barely. Mailman’s curriculum has undergone a significant redesign to replicate a brand new emphasis on well being preservation and prevention for each stage of life. Interdisciplinary research might be required of all college students. The curriculum, Dr. Fried boasts, is “completely distinctive” amongst colleges of public well being, and has generated quite a lot of curiosity. Purposes for 2012 admission to the grasp’s program have been up greater than 20 p.c from the yr earlier than.
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