Umpqua Bank, South Waterfront Branch, 3606 SW Bond Ave. Portland, OR 97239

This event joinly sponsored by

OHSU Heart Research Center, Portland City Club and South Waterfront Community Association

The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson, is the Multnomah County Library "Everybody Reads" book for 2010.  The book is set in the 1854 cholera epidemic in Victorian London and tells the story of how an adventurous scientist, Dr. John Snow, created a map of the cholera deaths to prove the cause and how the Rev. Henry Whitehead used his knowledge of the community to determine the initial case of the outbreak.  The story further explains the difficulty Snow encountered trying to transform the dogma of the time that cholera was caused by miasma (harmful fumes).

Featured Speaker:

David Barker, MD, PhD is the world’s expert on the early origins of chronic disease.   He is Professor of Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University and Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Southampton.  In 1986 he put forward the “fetal origins hypothesis” which stated that coronary heart disease originates as a consequence of malnutrition during fetal life and infancy.  He showed the correlation between low birth weight and an increased lifetime risk of heart disease, obesity and type-2 diabetes.  Like Dr. Snow, Professor Barker used the geographic distribution of disease and maps as his tools to develop this hypothesis that has changed our understanding of the roots of disease.  Diseases that were once thought to begin near the time of their manifestation in adult life are now known to have roots in pre- and early post-natal life and, in some cases, in previous generations. 

Moderator:

Margie Boulé will serve as moderator of this panel discussion.  She is a columnist for The Oregonian newspaper.  Margie had a congenital heart defect that was corrected in 1996.  She is a former Board member of the OHSU Heart Research Center.

Panelists:

Mel Kohn, M.D., M.P.H. of Portland, was named acting DHS Assistant Director for the State Public Health Division and State Health Officer in September, 2008. Previously he served as State Epidemiologist and administrator of the DHS Office of Disease Prevention and Epidemiology. He has worked in the public health sector since 1993, including two years as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  Before joining DHS in 1999, Kohn was Medical Director for a Section of the Louisiana Office of Public Health in New Orleans where he was also an assistant professor of Pediatrics at Tulane University School of Medicine.  Dr. Kohn received a B.A. in Russian and East European Studies from Yale (1981), took pre-med courses at Columbia University, received his M.D. from Harvard (1990), and received his Masters in Public Health (MPH) from Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine (1997). He completed his internship and residency in pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital in Boston, completed a preventive medicine residency at Oregon Health and Sciences University, and is board-certified in pediatrics and preventive medicine.

Deborah Lewinsohn, M.D. received her B.S. in biology from Yale University. She attended Stanford University School of Medicine and received her M.D. in 1989. Dr. Lewinsohn was a Fellow of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA, from 1993-1996 and an Associate in Clinical Resarch in the Immunology Program at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center 1993-1998. At present, she is adjunct Assistant Professor at the OHSU Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, an Assistant Professor in Infectious Disease in the Pediatrics Department of OHSU, affiliate Assistant Scientist at the Division of Pathobiology and Immunology, Oregon Regional Primate Research Center, OHSU, Portland, OR, and an assistant scientist at the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute.

The book is available at Multnomah County Library.  More information about the book can be found at:

http://www.theghostmap.com/ and http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/ghost_map.html