However, the quality of the people was such that it was very easy to provide initial training and ongoing guidance to Zairean clinicians to go ahead and do the complicated testing for developmental delays in young infants. It is where medicine was 50 to 100 years ago before we had the laboratory, before we had x-ray and other imaging techniques, before modern medicine became dominated by process. The Zairean physicians had the capacity to observe even when they didn t understand what the phenomenon was and to describe it in such a way that it became clear to somebody with larger experience. The capability and dedication were there, but they lacked resources and training. One way that we can begin to address this global disparity in health and understanding of health problems is to invest in people.
People are the greatest source of capital.
I am proud to be part of the Fogarty International Center at NIH, which has a long history of investing in human capacity in the developing countries. The longest-standing training program that Fogarty has sponsored has been in HIV, beginning around 1988 and by now resulting in the training of well over 1,500 individuals from approximately 100 countries. About half of them have earned master s degrees or in some cases Ph.D. degrees. Short-term training in country has reached about 5,000 to 6,000 more individuals. If you look at the public health community in the developing world working in the area of HIV, the majority of those individuals have been trained through an association with the NIH Fogarty-supported training programs through universities in the United States.