By Alec Rosenberg

Global health has grabbed headlines with the H1N1 flu outbreak. But where there is crisis, there is opportunity. The emerging global health field is also a significant driver of the state’s economy, a University of California study shows.

In California, global health generates about $60 billion in business activity, $24 billion in wages and $12 billion in taxes, according to preliminary estimates of a study led by Anil Deolalikar, associate dean of UC Riverside’s College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences and director of its Public Policy Initiative. UC campuses combined for $1.7 billion in research activity related to global health.

Speakers discussed the importance of global health at an event Monday (June 8) at the UC Center Sacramento and provided an update on the proposed UC School of Global Health.

The UC School of Global Health would be the university’s first multicampus, systemwide school. After several years of planning, the school is expected to seek approval from Regents in 2010 and admit its first students for summer 2012, awarding master’s degrees initially and doctorates eventually.

“This could be a landmark school of global health in the world,” said Tom Coates, who directs UCLA’s Program in Global Health and is interim deputy director for planning for the UC School of Global Health.

Still, given the state’s fiscal crisis, funding for the new school will be a challenge, Coates acknowledged. “We definitely will have to raise private resources to make this happen,” he said.

UC did receive a $4 million school planning grant last year from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“I think it’s an idea whose time has come,” said Richard Feachem, a professor of global health at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco who directs the global health group at UCSF Global Health Sciences.

Global health has attracted the interest of the public, students and faculty. A November poll of Californians found that 76 percent said establishing a UC School of Global Health should be a high priority, said Mary Woolley, president of Research!America, a nonprofit alliance. A UC survey of students on the Los Angeles and San Diego campuses found that more than half of undergraduates were “somewhat or very interested” in a major or minor in global health.

Meanwhile, more than 500 UC faculty members are involved in some aspect of global health, said Ellen Switkes, UC planning coordinator for the School of Global Health. They include Jonna Mazet, professor of epidemiology and wildlife health and director of the Wildlife Health Center at UC Davis. She discussed her research into the interface of animals and people and disease transmission in drought-stricken rural Tanzania.

“It’s only through working together that we’re really going to solve things,” said Mazet, adding that the UC School of Global Health could help in that role.

Global health crosses multiple disciplines and spans a range of topics such as pandemics, chronic disease, health care disparities, climate change’s impact on health and the safety and security of global food and water supplies.

“The global health agenda is very large,” Feachem said. “It goes from genetics to global governance.”

During Monday's event, Feachem predicted that the 21st century would be “a century of pandemics,” and Howard Backer, associate secretary for emergency preparedness in the California Health and Human Services Agency, discussed the state’s preparedness for pandemics.

The agency’s Department of Public Health sponsored Monday’s event, along with the UC School of Global Health Planning Office, UCSF Global Health Sciences and UC Center Sacramento.

Alec Rosenberg is coordinator of health communications for UC Office of the President.