Dr. Ricard Cash: Short biosketch and talk abstract

Richard A. Cash, MD, MPH began his career in international/global health over 50 years ago at in Dhaka, Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) at the Cholera Research Hospital (now the icddr,b) where he and colleagues conducted the first clinical trials of Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT) in adult and pediatric patients, with cholera and other enteric infections. This led to further work with BRAC, now the world’s largest NGO, on scaling up ORT programs in Bangladesh that eventually reached 13 million mothers and documented in two books: “The Simple Solution”; and “From One to Many: Scaling Up Health Programs in Low Income Countries”.

The scaling up of their DOTS program was discussed in “Making TB History”, which described a program that today covers about 100 million. Both the ORT and TB treatment programs used unique management tools in their scaling up activities.

In 2007 he was presented with the Prince Mahidol Award in Public Health for his work on ORT and in 2011 received the Fries Prize.

Dr. Cash will share and discuss the above experiences in his talk.

Faculty organizer: Prof. K. Mukherjee, CHPPM, SHSS