University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

UB’s Center for Health in Housing is reconnecting with the Inter-American Healthy Housing Network, which is organizing national conferences on responses to hurricanes and earthquakes.

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By JUDSON MEAD

Published: July 22, 2009

After a few years in hiatus, UB’s World Health Organization (WHO) collaborating Center for Health in Housing is back on track. Co-directors John Stone, clinical associate professor of rehabilitation science, and Edward Steinfeld, director of the Center for Inclusive Design and Environmental Access (IDEA) in the School of Architecture and Planning, have the funding and contacts through their own research centers to restart the center and renew its ties with other WHO centers.

A joint effort of the School of Public Health and Health Professions and the School of Architecture and Planning, the UB center is one of more than 900 WHO collaborating centers worldwide and the only one of 89 in the U.S. that deals with health in housing.

WHO collaborating centers, which can be as small as a research laboratory or as large as a ministry of health, perform research and development work relevant to WHO’s objectives.

While the WHO designation does not come with funding, it is more than an honorary imprimatur. One of WHO’s expectations for its collaborating centers is that they will indeed collaborate—with each other, where appropriate, and with others working on health issues in the same area of expertise.

Founded in 1988 by Harold Cohen, then dean of the School of Architecture and Planning, UB’s WHO collaborating center ran projects in Latin America, provided technical support for the Washington, D.C., office of the Pan American Health Organization and hosted visiting fellows.

When Cohen retired in 1996, Maurizio Trevisan, former dean of the School of Public Health and Health Professions and chair of the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine in the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, became director. Under Trevisan, the center focused on ecological indicators of neighborhood quality and their effect on individual health, which was an interest of the Buffalo Health Study that Trevisan was pursuing through the Center for Preventive Medicine.

The WHO center was quiescent for a few years during the formation of the School of Public Health and Health Professions. When the WHO designation came up for renewal in 2007, then interim dean Lynn Kozlowski tapped Stone to steer it into the next era.

Stone was an obvious choice because the center, which has no funding of its own, must find its home where relevant work already is well-established. Stone directs the Center for International Rehabilitation Research Information and Exchange, so he has both extensive international contacts and expertise in disseminating information.

One of the main focus areas of IDEA, headed by Steinfeld, is housing that is equally accommodating for persons with or without disabilities. Both Stone’s and Steinfeld’s centers are well-funded and productive legs for the newest incarnation of the WHO collaborating center to stand on.

Now more like a consortium than a single-focus enterprise, the Center for Health in Housing also comprises the work by Pavani Ram on sanitation and water supplies, and the work conducted in the Center for Assistive Technology in the public health school.

In addition to serving as a window for the world community on UB’s work in these broad areas, the center also is a portal for UB into health-in-housing work elsewhere, especially in the Americas.

When Stone took responsibility for the center, its former connections with a body called the Inter-American Healthy Housing Network were dormant. Serendipitously, through a connection at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) in Rio de Janeiro, Stone found his way to Carlos Barcelo, executive director of the network in Havana, Cuba.

A few months later, Stone attended an Inter-American Healthy Housing Network seminar on natural disasters and housing, which gave him the opportunity to meet network colleagues and re-establish UB’s presence among them.

Stone came back to Buffalo with a folder full of fresh contacts and offers by representatives of other centers and the Pan American Health Organization to consult with UB on ways its Center for Health in Housing can re-engage with its fellow centers in Latin America.