Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health Creates National Center for Disaster Preparedness

Children's Health Fund
Monday, 28 April 2003

Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health today announced the creation of its new National Center for Disaster Preparedness and named Dr. Irwin Redlener, a leading child advocate and pediatrician, as its first director. Redlener joins the Mailman School of Public Health as associate dean for Public Health Advocacy and Preparedness. He will lead the new center while continuing as president of The Children's Health Fund, a national organization devoted to providing healthcare to medically underserved children, which he co-founded in 1987. Dr. Redlener leaves Montefiore Medical Center where he was responsible for the development of one of the most advanced children's hospitals in the world.

The new Center, an expansion of Columbia's current disaster preparedness efforts, will serve as a national resource and training ground for community and public health emergency preparedness. It will develop protocols for the diagnosis of and response to bioterrorism, with public policy recommendations as a key area of focus. Along those lines, the Center, under Dr. Redlener's direction, will soon release a report on the readiness of the pediatric public health community to deal with bioterrorism.

The Center will also help communities gauge their state of readiness and offer guidance on how to improve it. It will also work with medical facilities to establish guidelines and costs for achieving high levels of preparedness. The Center will help define preparedness; identify and provide for the needs of communities, families, and children; and establish guidelines for communication to the public. In addition, the Center will identify and prepare appropriate strategies to meet the psychological and social aspects of preparedness and response to terrorism and develop training curricula for public health officials.

Since September 11, 2001, Dr. Redlener has emerged as one of the country's leading authorities on terrorism and disaster preparedness, with a particular emphasis on the needs of children and families. He was among the first to call attention to the special vulnerabilities of children to chemical and biological agents, outlining recommendations and urging legislators to strengthen the public health system to include provisions for children. These recommendations helped to serve as an impetus for children's provisions that were incorporated into a bioterrorism bill signed by President Bush in June 2002. In February 2003, Dr. Redlener convened a coalition of experts from government agencies, professional organizations, emergency medicine, and other specialties to analyze existing data on the needs of children in disaster planning, preparation and response at the federal, state and local levels and develop consensus recommendations about pediatric emergency preparedness.

"Irwin Redlener will provide extraordinary leadership for the new National Center for Disaster Preparedness," said Allan Rosenfield, MD, dean of the Mailman School. "The Center provides him and his colleagues an outstanding opportunity to further their goals of helping children and families handle disasters while also serving as a resource for communities, first responders, health care and public officials for crisis information, assessment and education. His passion and commitment to public health and the underserved make him the ideal person to play a leadership role at the School in public health advocacy and disaster preparedness," he added.

The Mailman School currently leads several initiatives in disaster preparedness. Faculty from the School conducted a needs assessment of mental health issues affecting New York residents directly related to the World Trade Center disaster. Other initiatives at the School are studying NYC schoolchildren suffering from mental health disorders, and identifying children with high need for September 11-related mental health services. The School's researchers are assessing the effects of airborne pollutants on the health of pregnant women and their babies who were in the vicinity of the World Trade Center disaster. The School's Center for Public Health Preparedness, whose many programs will continue under the national center, is examining the factors associated with the evacuation of the World Trade Center.

"These are extraordinary times for public health. Clearly we need to make sure that the country is optimally prepared for disasters in general and for the terrible potential of more terrorism, a critical challenge in these times of shrinking resources and extraordinary threats. The new Center will be a resource on many critical aspects of preparedness for the region and the nation," said Dr. Redlener. "The other challenge we face is to make sure that the we stay focused on the traditional public health agenda, including access to health care for everyone, preventing tobacco-related illness, dealing with global concerns of HIV/AIDS, environmental hazards, and other problems," he added.

Dr. Redlener will continue as president of The Children's Health Fund, which he co-founded with singer Paul Simon. The nationally acclaimed New York Children's Health Project within the Fund's 15-site program network has become the template for providing health services to underserved children in urban and rural communities across the country. More than 300,000 children have received medical care through the Fund's national network.

Prior to joining the Mailman School, Dr. Redlener was president of The Children's Hospital and director of the Child Health Network, and director of Community Pediatrics at Montefiore Medical Center. He also served as professor of Pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and lecturer in Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Redlener received his MD from the University of Miami School of Medicine, and pediatric training at Babies Hospital of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center at Columbia University's Health Sciences campus, the University of Colorado Medical Center, and the University of Miami-Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami.

About the Mailman School of Public Health

The only accredited school of public health in New York City, and among the first in the nation, Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health provides instruction and research opportunities to more than 800 graduate students in pursuit of masters and doctoral degrees. Its students and over 200 multi-disciplinary faculty engage in research and service in the city, nation, and around the world, concentrating on biostatistics, environmental health sciences, epidemiology, health policy and management, population and family health, and sociomedical sciences.

For more information, or to contact Children's Health Fund, see their website at: www.childrenshealthfund.org