Washington

Plans for a more integrated approach to the world's health problems are gathering momentum, according to their architect Richard Klausner, a former director of the US National Cancer Institute.

Klausner wants to increase the effectiveness of public-health campaigns in developing countries by merging areas such as economics and political science into public-health thinking. This field of 'global health sciences' would also foster connections between institutions in the developed and the developing world to bolster the public-health infrastructures of poorer nations.

During the six months since he became executive director of the global health programme at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington, Klausner has met with researchers across Europe and the United States to advocate the creation of the new field. “The people I've spoken to are very intrigued,” he says.

“It's time to change how we do public health,” agrees Josh Ruxin of the Center for Global Health and Economic Development at Columbia University in New York. Poverty, corruption and regional instability are often critical factors that determine how an epidemic unfolds. “But you don't learn how to deal with those issues in public-health schools,” Ruxin says.

Partnerships between the developed and developing world are also essential to improving public health, adds Amir Attaran, a public-policy expert at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. “There are astonishingly few scientific resources in developing countries,” he says. Fostering research communities through collaboration would go a long way towards increasing the quality of public health, he suggests.

Klausner, who oversees half of the roughly US$1 billion in grants given out by the Gates Foundation, is optimistic that institutions will take up his idea. “Stay tuned,” he says. “I think a lot is going to happen in the next year or so.”