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The
Prevention Effectiveness Fellowship
National
Center for Environmental Health &
Office of Genomics and Disease Prevention |
The mission of NCEH
is to provide national leadership, through science and service, to
promote health and quality of life by preventing and controlling
disease, birth defects, disability, and death resulting from
interactions between people and their environment. The mission of OGDP
is to promote and coordinate the integration of genetics into public
health research and services throughout CDC.
For example, OGDP
encourages research on gene-environment interactions to gain insight
into more effective disease prevention opportunities that may come
from targeting the environmental factors that interact with genetic
susceptibility to produce disease. OGDP
also seeks to address policy questions arising from the identification
of genetic risk factors for disease and the development of laboratory
tests for susceptibility genotypes. OGDP
is located administratively within NCEH,
and works closely with programs in NCEH
and other centers at CDC. The Prevention Effectiveness Fellow at OGDP/NCEH
would have the opportunity to participate in one of the emerging areas
of public health in the new millennium.
Potential and Ongoing Research
Projects for Fellow Involvement
| 1. |
Economists and
epidemiologists at CDC are
engaged with academic partners to assess the costs and likely
effectiveness of population-based screening for hereditary
hemochromatosis. The Fellow would have the opportunity of
working with experienced public health economists to update
and elaborate a cost-effectiveness model for hemochromatosis
screening of adults.
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| 2. |
Genetic tests for
mutations that increase risks for certain kinds of cancer are
already available and being promoted. Evaluation of the risks
and benefits of such tests from an individual perspective can
be modeled with the end product being the development of an
interactive decision model that providers could use to counsel
individuals regarding the decision to be tested.
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| 3. |
The largest genetic
testing program in the United States is the screening of dried
blood spots from 3.9 million newborns each year for a number
of metabolic or genetic diseases. A new laboratory technology
called tandem mass spectrometry has been developed that may
fundamentally alter the way newborn screening is done. A
quantitative and qualitative policy analysis of the
implications of this technology is urgently needed. This
project would be done in collaboration with the Division
of Laboratory Sciences at NCEH. |
For information on how to apply, visit http://www.cdc.gov/epo/fellow.htm
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