As if witnessing the level of health care delivered in a country with few resources was not enough to make me proud to have been a part of this journey, CIDS was truly jaw-dropping. I have an extensive background in research and can appreciate the solid design and data collection of CIDS Demographic Surveillance System Database.
Dr. Manuel Salazar took the time to explain how their sophisticated computer program is loaded with an extraordinary amount of data where it is quite easy to propose a research question and be able to locate a randomized sample of the population that one wishes to study. There are many checks and balances to the fieldwork, where researchers return to the community to fill in missing data. Some of their published topics include traffic accident clusters, gender-race violence, sex education, suicide and HIV. He was kind enough to even provide us with copies of more recent publications.
Toward the end of our discussion, Dr. Salazar explained how he was excited to invite the UMass Global Health fellows back to conduct research in our third year. He explained that the medical schools’ masters program includes a two-week intensive course where students are taught epidemiology and are able to design and complete a pilot research study in these two weeks. With our month, he could ensure that we had enough background on setting up our project to ensure success in completing a sophisticated global health research project. I think we all left there thinking we had won the lottery!
