Public health expert, Gonzaga grad Dr. Cornelia Davis warns of changing health trends in U.S.

With the Trump administrations drastic reversal from participating and leading efforts to combate the spread of disease , Dr. Cornelia “Connie” Davis fears the global infrastructure of public health is dying.

In the 1970s, the Gonzaga University graduate fought to eradicate smallpox in India and worked in public health across the globe for organizations like the World Health Organization, U.S. Agency for International Development and the United Nations. While spending her career outside of the United States, Davis said her work protected Americans from disease.

“I am worried that a lot of the mechanisms that keep the U.S. protected will be destroyed and rebuilding things takes time and money, and that means you’re going to lose more Americans by the time you try to rebuild back to where we were,” she said Friday.

Davis was back in Spokane this weekend after graduating from Gonzaga in 1967. Davis was the keynote speaker at Gonzaga’s graduate school commencement ceremony.

She credits her Jesuit education for opening the door to her globetrotting career. As a pre-med undergraduate, she spent a year as an exchange student in Florence, Italy.

“It opened up my world. It made me realize that as an African American woman in the 1960s, that I was not just limited in my work to the United States,” she said.

It was that experience that gave her the confidence in her late 20s to take a job with the World Health Organization in rural India. She spent much of the 1970s helping impoverished families get vaccinated against the disease, which was eradicated from the globe before the end of that decade.

She went on in her career to treat Malaria in Africa and HIV/AIDS in regions across Asia.

Davis has been “disheartened” to see the United States leave the World Health Organization and many other organizations she spent her career working with to fight the spread disease.

“If these organizations are not able to do the things they normally do, we’re going to see more epidemics, see more disease come back,” she said.

In the United States, she is most concerned with the return of measles. The current outbreak in the southwestern United States has seen more than 1,000 cases. At the turn of the millennium, the disease had been declared eradicated in America.

In India, she saw mothers who would walk 5 kilometers to get their kids vaccinated because “they saw with their own eyes the kids who did not get vaccinated were the kids that died.”

Measles could have up to a 30 to 40% mortality rate in many of these areas where most children are malnourished.

In other countries, she worries how cuts to U.S. aid could kill tens of thousands, if not more. In Africa, the United States had been the main funder of HIV/AIDS prevention. The Trump administration cut millions of dollars of that funding in January. According to a recent study in The Lancet journal, these cuts will lead to the deaths of an estimated 60,000 Africans even if the funding were restored immediately .

“We needed to be in places like Senegal to learn what this outbreak is about, gather specimens for study. Because the knowledge we gain from places where disease is endemic allows us to develop the antibiotics and the vaccines we need to protect the U.S. That is why it is in our interest to do this work,” she said.