Buchanan travels to Russia, September 5 – 14, 2006
At the invitation of Senator Stan Rosenberg, Dr. David Buchanan participated in site visits to St. Petersburg and Pskov, Russia, from September 5-14. He went as part of a 17-member delegation that included 4 state senators, a state representative, two people representing the tourism industry, two businessmen from the International Rotary Club, two UMass Food Science faculty, and two members who went to discuss the possibilities of initiating new public health projects. The second member of the health team was Dr. Michael Wong, an infectious disease physician from Harvard Medical School.
The delegation spent 2 working days in St. Petersburg, and 2 working days in Pskov, a city of 200,000 people about 200 miles south-southwest of St. Petersburg. In St. Petersburg, Buchanan met with Rector Mikhail Fedorov, and Vice-Rector Vladimir Kozlov of the Saint Petersburg State Polytechnical University, which has approximately 30,000 students. They discussed the possibility of starting a new program in public health there and they expressed strong interest in the prospect. Dr. Rick Taupier (Associate Director of the Environmental Institute here at UMass, who has a long 15+ year relationship with Rector Federov) and Buchanan are planning to follow-up to begin drafting a plan for starting such a program. Dr. Taupier is now trying to arrange a visit to St. Petersburg for VP Williams in May, 2007.
In Pskov, Buchanan and others met with Aleksey Kovalev, the Chair of the Health Care Committee of Pskov City Administration, and the directors of three of their health clinics. The Health Department provides medical services for all residents of Pskov. They run 4 adult and 2 pediatric outpatient clinics, 2 hospitals, a dental clinic and an infectious disease unit (HIV, TB, Hep C, etc.); they employ over 500 physicians, 2,000 nurses, and 3,500 total employees. Building on a 10-year relationship with Sen. Rosenberg, they have asked UMass for assistance in starting public health programs addressing adolescent reproductive health, and diabetes and stroke prevention. (As you may know, Russia has been experiencing a decline in life expectancy since the fall of the Soviet Union.) Sen. Rosenberg invited the International Rotary Club (IRC) members to join us because the IRC has a “Health, Hunger, and Humanity” fund that provides up to $300,000 for 2-4 year projects. As a result of the site visit, we now plan to submit two proposals to the IRC, an immediate small grant for $25,000 due December 1, and the larger proposal for $300,000 due March 1, 2007.
If everything goes well, we will also explore the possibility of bringing these two projects together, for example, by using the Pskov project as a training site for faculty at the St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute.
