Members
Profiles
From left to right, five more Association members: here are Wan Manan,
Daniel Hoffman, Margaret Miller, Ellen Girerd-Barclay. Khalid Iqbal
The membership team reports: This month we present five new profiles. This year of 2012 has started very well for our Association and the feeling of the closeness of Rio2012, our congress in Rio de Janeiro, which takes place between 27-30 April, is inspiring. Our Association is created at a critical time in history, when need for collective action in the public interest is most urgent. Welcoming new members is central to achieve our goals.
Our profiles are unusual. They usually start with a recollection of early life experiences. After that personal introduction, a brief professional experience report is included, highlighting current work. So this month (left, above) we begin with Wan Manan, who was born in Malaysia and grew up there, and then after went to Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, US. He is now professor of nutrition and public health and chairperson of the programme in nutrition, at the school of health sciences, University of Science, Penang, in Malaysia. He says: 'My interest in public health nutrition started in my first year undergraduate course, after witnessing the suffering from hunger and poverty as a result of the energy crisis in 1973. I then changed my major to nutrition to learn and understand better the political economy of diseases and malnutrition'.
Next is Daniel Hoffman from the US, who is associate professor and chair of the department of nutritional sciences at the school of environmental and biological sciences at Rutgers University. His early life was spent in Minnesota in the midwest of the US, where food and agriculture are major parts of life and culture, and home to many food companies, including Pillsbury and Cargill.
Margaret Miller, third from left, is Australian. She managed the nutrition and physical activity programme for the Western Australian Department of Health for 15 years, and now works as a public health nutrition consultant to state and national governments, universities, research institutes and civil society organisations. She grew up as one of five children on a dairy farm in an isolated region of Victoria, Australia. Her fondest memories are of expeditions with friends and family to collect wild berries, mushrooms and fruit in abandoned orchards.
Second from right is Ellen Girerd-Barclay. She was born in the US, but has travelled, lived and worked in a number of low-income countries around the world, since her youth. She writes: ' On a visit to India when I was 13, I watched women collecting grains of rice outside of a shop, which had fallen into the gutter from a delivery truck, hoping to gather enough for the family dinner. This experience was a turning point for me: I decided to abandon my dream of becoming a cordon bleu chef, and instead devote my life to nutrition, focusing on nutrition education as a way to help people tackle poverty and overcome malnutrition.
'In 1976, my parents volunteered work in Papua New Guinea. As I was only 18, and nearly finished with my university studies, I took a year off, and worked on a small island near Madang, teaching local women about food, nutrition, basic health and hygiene, and child care. I also did basic dressings for the villagers, treating micronutrient deficiencies, wounds and infections that were an everyday occurrence' She then departed for the Solomon Islands 'a few weeks after graduation as a Peace Corps volunteer. Then I took a job teaching home economics at an international school in the Himalayas. I continued on to India, but after one term I returned to the Thai/Cambodian border. There, I managed Care-Thailand's general rations, cross-border food distributions and supplementary/ therapeutic feeding programmes in four refugee camps'. What an impressive and inspiring set of experiences.
Right above is Khalid Iqbal from Pakistan, who has worked with under 5 year old refugee children. This has strengthened his dedication to public health nutrition. He says: 'During my undergraduate course, I worked in a nutritional rehabilitation centre as a trainee, at Khyber teaching hospital in Peshawar. The nature and extent of malnourished cases we received almost each day was incredible. From that time, I realised that the only sustainable solution to the issue of malnutrition is emphasis on public health nutrition'.
We are glad to have new members such as these: diverse, interesting and committed to public health nutrition in so many of its aspects. Sharing our experiences and beliefs can make us stronger and help to build a different reality every day.
Isabela Sattamini and the Association membership team
Isabelasattamini@gmail.com
