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Program will focus on fighting disease, address dearth of health workers
UC San Diego is expected to receive permission today to create a $100 million school of public health capable of spotting and fighting disease worldwide, assessing how pollution from wildfires affects specific communities, and evaluating mobile medical devices.
The program also will address California’s emerging shortage of health workers, including a projected need for 160,000 home care employees over the next decade.
The proposed school was unanimously approved Wednesday by a committee of the University of California Board of Regents, with final authorization scheduled to come today. The move could become part of a much larger public health initiative. Planners have told regents that they eventually may be asked to green-light similar programs at the system’s campuses in Irvine, Merced, Davis and San Francisco.
UC Berkeley and UCLA already operate nationally ranked schools of public health.
“Medical schools train physicians to treat individual patients,” said Dr. David Brenner, UC San Diego’s Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences. “We also need to be concerned about people’s lives and needs across populations. That’s what we’ll do. It is a missing piece.”
UC San Diego is one of the 10 largest research universities in the country and is broadly involved in public health.
The university is studying e-cigarettes, which have emerged as a public health concern due to a mysterious illness tied to vaping. It also is examining the relationship between sedentary behavior and heart disease in Latinos. UC San Diego engineers spent months talking to families and social workers about how to design robots that care for people with dementia. The school’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography is analyzing how sea spray affects climate, which in turn can affect people’s ability to breathe and sleep if the air becomes too hot.
And the school is trying to figure out why a disproportionately large number of people at a village in Italy live to be 100 or older.
UC San Diego’s supporters include Florida billionaire-inventor Herbert Wertheim, who gave the campus $25 million last year to begin developing a school of public health. He also might help the campus come up with the additional $75 million it needs in private donations to flesh out the program, which eventually will feature a new building.
The university will ask regents to name the school after the 80-year-old Wertheim, who told the Union-Tribune on Wednesday: “We need to find ways to prevent disease and to better help people who already have things like diabetes and hypertension. The ideas David (Brenner) has been coming up with are fantastic.”
Wertheim is an optometrist and engineer who is credited with helping millions of people to avoid developing cataracts and macular degeneration by creating eyewear that better screens out ultraviolet and blue light.
He believes that schools should draw together people from many disciplines to tackle major problems. That’s the approach being taken by UC San Diego, which says it will collectively exploit the research talent it has in its separate schools of medicine, pharmaceutical science, and engineering, as well as Scripps and the San Diego Supercomputer Center.
The move is “the next logical step in the evolution of our public health programs, initiatives, clinics, undergraduate degree program and existing faculty expertise,” UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla said in a statement.
“With a focus on public health, we can define the future where medicine, biology, engineering and public policy come together. We can look at how we, as human beings, can live in a better society and create better health outcomes for each and every one of us, regardless of our socioeconomic background.”
San Diego State University already has a school of public health, and Cal State San Marcos has a department in this same broad area of science.
“I don’t see any overlap. They will all be contributing to the workforce,” said Dr. Wilma J. Wooten, the public health officer for San Diego County.
The new program also was embraced Wednesday by Stephen Welter, vice president for research at SDSU.
“Both institutions have unique strengths that can be brought to bear on the public health issues facing San Diego and the world,” Welter said.
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