ANN ARBOR—In the first trip of its kind, a group of 30 graduate students from the University of Michigan School of Public Health will leave Friday to spend spring break working with the China Centers for Disease Control in Tianjin, China, a city of 10 million just south of Beijing.

The students will be assigned to field work in district hospitals and village clinics, participating in projects related to immunizations, maternal and child health, environmental health and outbreak investigation.

Dr. Jianli Kan, director of epidemiology for the National China CDC, says this is the first time the China CDC has hosted American students for practice-based deployments. Kan trained under Matthew Boulton, SPH associate dean and the program’s director, at the Michigan Department of Community Health.

Organizers expect the program to infuse new ideas into the Chinese public health system and to give American students exposure to problems they’re not likely to encounter at home.

“We worry about avian flu and SARS arriving here,” Boulton said. “China’s public health system has been dealing with both for years now.”

In China, diseases that have been long under control here, such as tuberculosis, measles and typhoid, are still serious threats. China has built much of its public health infrastructure from scratch after the SARS epidemic of 2003, including a sophisticated electronic disease reporting system

The Chinese public health system comprises a national CDC, which has been heavily invested in and oversees an extensive country-wide system of local, provincial and city CDCs. The students will spend their time in Tianjin, one of four large city CDCs in China. Others are located in Shanghai, Chongqing and Beijing. Each of these city CDCs oversees a complex network of provincial and district hospitals, rural village clinics and other intermediate outpatient facilities over a large geographic areas and burgeoning human populations.

The U-M and the Tianjin Center for Disease Control and Prevention in China formally agreed to a scholar exchange program last September. The agreement provides reciprocal opportunities for scholarly exchange of students and faculty for training and joint research. Already, the SPH has had public health physician residents spend several month training rotations there and three public health graduate students will complete summer internships working in Tianjin. The first Chinese public health leaders, Drs. Wenti Xu and Guohong Jiang of the Tianjin CDC, arrived in Ann Arbor in January and will be at the SPH through March.

Goals of the exchange program are to conduct applied joint research, engage in public health practice and ultimately gain a better understanding of each other’s public health systems.

The students will be accompanied by staff from the SPH Office of Public Health Practice, which is the institutional home to the China Scholar Exchange Program.

The University of Michigan School of Public Health has been promoting health and preventing disease since 1941, and is ranked among the top five public health schools in the nation. Faculty and students in the school’s five academic departments and dozens of collaborative centers and initiatives are forging new solutions to the complex health challenges of today, including chronic disease, health care quality and finance, emerging genetic technologies, climate change, socioeconomic inequalities and their impact on health, infectious disease and the globalization of health. Whether making new discoveries in the lab or researching and educating in the field, SPH faculty, students and alumni are deployed around the globe to promote and protect our health.
For more on Boulton: http://www.sph.umich.edu/iscr/faculty/profile.cfm?uniqname=mboulton

For more on CSEP: https://practice.sph.umich.edu/practice/ipp.php

Matthew BoultonCSEP