SPH Reads: Everything is Tuberculosis

Dr. Cozier is an investigator on the Black Women’s Health Study (BWHS) and the BWHS Sarcoidosis Study at the Slone Epidemiology Center. Her research interests include social and genetic determinants of health in African-American women — specifically, the influence of psychosocial stressors (e.g., racism, neighborhood socioeconomic status), and genetics in the development of cancer, cardiometabolic, and immune-mediated diseases (sarcoidosis, lupus). Additional research interests include oral health, and the role that religiosity/spirituality and the faith community, particularly the black church, plays in health promotion/disease prevention in the Black community.

Dr. Horsburgh has 30 years of experience in public health and medicine. He currently holds faculty positions in the Departments of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, Global Health and Medicine. Dr. Horsburgh teaches courses in the Epidemiology of AIDS, the Epidemiology of Tuberculosis and Vaccine Epidemiology. His research focuses on tuberculosis, nontuberculous mycobacterial infections and opportunistic infections in AIDS. Currently, he is involved in research in Brazil, India, South Africa, Tanzania, Vietnam and the Philippines. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (IUATLD) and Chairman of the Steering Committee of RESIST-TB, an international organization dedicated to improving MDR-TB treatment through Clinical Trials and dissemination of best practices (www.resisttb.org).

Assoc. Professor Bruce Kirenga is the Principal, Makerere University College of Health Sciences (MakCHS). He is a pulmonologist, researcher, and founder of the Makerere University Lung Institute and an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine at Makerere University. He is a respected respiratory physician and researcher with a strong academic background and extensive research experience. His work has contributed significantly to the understanding of airway diseases and TB control in Uganda and beyond.

Dr. Kirenga completed his internal medicine training at Makerere University, followed by specialty registrar training in Pulmonary Medicine at Mulago Hospital. He furthered his education with an additional year of clinical and research training in the Section of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Yale University, USA. Additionally, Dr. Kirenga earned a PhD in Medicines from the University of Groningen in The Netherlands.

Dr. Kirenga’s research work focuses on airway diseases and their determinants, as well as tuberculosis (TB) control. He has been involved in several studies, including one that highlighted the significance of organ damage in asymptomatic COVID-19 patients and another that explored the prevalence of allergies in Kampala residents.

Dr. Mitnick graduated cum laude from the University of Rochester in 1988 with a B.A. in political science and French. She spent 1986-1987 in Paris, France, studying at L’Institut d’Etudes Politiques and L’Université de Paris IV. In 1996, she received a masters in international health epidemiology and ecology from the Harvard School of Public Health, and in 2001 she completed a doctor of science degree in international health epidemiology and ecology, also at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Dr. Mitnick’s research centers on the improvement of clinical management and programmatic policy for tuberculosis and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) globally. Dr. Mitnick is a founding investigator of a movement to conduct randomized controlled clinical trials to improve treatment of drug-resistant TB (RESIST-TB). Dr. Mitnick’s work also includes applying marginal structural modeling to MDR-TB treatment data to assess the effect on outcomes of different types of therapy in observational studies. Dr. Mitnick is the principal investigator of an NIAID grant to plan a Phase II clinical trial examining the potential of high-dose rifampin to shorten standard TB therapy. Her research questions are strongly influenced by the mission of Partners In Health, with which Dr. Mitnick has worked since 1996: she strives to conduct research that will effect changes in global policy to ensure the highest standard of care and best treatment outcomes for patients suffering from all forms of tuberculosis, regardless of where they live.

This influence has also driven Dr. Mitnick’s involvement in global policy efforts. She contributed to the original and revised Guidelines for the Programmatic Management of MDR-TB. She sought, through the publication, Randomized trials to optimize treatment of MDR-TB: the time for action is now (PLoS Medicine, 2007), to generate increased support for controlled examination of anti-mycobacterial agents for the treatment of MDR-TB. Through participation in working groups, sub-groups, and task forces of the STOP-TB Partnership, she has co-authored two articles which define research agendas for MDR-TB (Gupta et al., IJTLD, 2003; Cobelens et al., PLoS Medicine 2008) and one that proposed standardized definitions for analysis of MDR-TB treatment outcomes (Laserson et al., IJTLD, 2005). She consults for the Green Light Committee of the World Health Organization for francophone countries implementing programmatic management of MDR-TB. Her efforts extend to capacity building for recording and reporting on the management of drug-resistant TB, as well as to clinical and operational research in Latin America and beyond. She develops and participates in post-graduate trainings, network-building activities, and trial protocols to be implemented within settings of national TB programs around the world.