By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor WASHINGTON, Jan 10 (Reuters) - Atlanta's Emory University launched a new global health institute on Wednesday in recognition that diseases from AIDS to bird flu cross all political and philosophical barriers. The plan is to train workers at Emory and abroad, develop drugs and build facilities to fight diseases that now cripple economies and that threaten to destabilize entire regions. "Health issues have become remarkably similar around the world," said Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, vice president for academic health affairs at Emory University's Woodruff Health Sciences Center. "Even when we can be in an extremely hostile relationship with a country or a group of people ... when you talk about health and children and keeping pregnant women healthy you are on the exact same wavelength," Koplan, a former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a telephone interview. The program, in partnership with Finland's National Public Health Institute, Kansanterveyslaitos or KTL, will start off with a five-year grant of nearly $20 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The university has budgeted $110 million for the new institute. The World Health Organization, humanitarian groups such as Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) and others have said it is vital to build facilities and keep trained medical staff in developing countries. WHO estimates that 4 million more health workers are needed globally to cope with AIDS alone, which has killed 25 million people in 25 years. Tuberculosis and malaria kill another 3 to 4 million people each year. DISEASE KNOWS NO BORDERS "I think recent events such as the SARS epidemic, West Nile and certainly avian flu make it clear to us that the boundaries of what separate us from others have been degraded," Koplan said. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, swept out of China in 2002 and 2003, infected 8,000 people and killed nearly 800 before it was suppressed. West Nile Virus, usually seen in the Middle East and parts of southern Europe, arrived in the Americas in 1999, while experts fear H5N1 avian influenza, which has killed just 157 people since 2003, might mutate into a pandemic strain. Koplan said he hoped graduates would come back to Emory to seek funding for projects in their home countries, instead of abandoning their countries which have lacked opportunities for them "to pursue their profession in a way that is gratifying to them." The new Emory institute will support the International Association of National Public Health Institutes (http://www.ianphi.org), established a year ago. Unlike earlier health initiatives in which doctors from rich countries have come in and lectured their poorer counterparts, Koplan said the new approach will involve a lot of listening. "The purpose of this health institute and the philosophy behind it will be much about partnerships. It is not like we are bringing light and truth to anyone," he said. Koplan said experts at Emory are already working on the kinds of programs the institute will foster, including work on discovering new drugs in South Africa, vaccine development in India and health research in Mexico.
