Personal experience

By Ruth SoRelle, M.P.H.

Dr. Clinton A. White said that his own interest in international health began in college, where he met people from all over the world. As he became interested in the issues of their nations, he became a "quasi-missionary person" intent on doing what he could to help. Medical school seemed a logical outlet, and he did his residency at the University of Washington where he worked with a variety of immigrants. He began a study of parasites during a fellowship at Yale University School of Medicine. Then he worked in Venezuela for six months before coming to BCM.

"One of the things I like about Baylor was that I got to work at Ben Taub," he said. "I came here because I wanted to work with immigrants and indigent patients at Ben Taub."

His work there and descriptions in the medical literature of the problems he has found has made him a U.S. expert in clinical tropical medicine. He is a past president of the clinicians' group of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene and works with the national council. All of that is based on the work he has done in Houston.

"It's amazing what we've seen in the Texas Medical Center," said White, who has published a series of cases of pregnant women with malaria and treated people infected by the loa loa parasite, transmitted by the bite of particular flies in West Africa. (Malaria During Pregnancy; Malaria; Loa loa: A cutaneous filarial parasite of humans; Filariasis)

The problems are not just international.

"Every two to three years, someone dies from malaria in Houston," he said. "They die because they did not receive the proper preventive treatment."

"It's an ongoing issue with international travel and immigration," said White. "It's so common you can't practice medicine in the United States without having to deal with. Yet the medical school curriculum is quite crowded, and this tends to get displaced until someone gets very sick."

"We see diseases here that people acquired elsewhere. That's the nature of globalization," he said. AIDS is one example, but it is not the only one.