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NEW YORK, NY June 12, 2006 —A half-million women around the world die during childbirth each year. That we even know this number and are slowly making progress to improve it is something many people attribute to Dr. Allan Rosenfield. Rosenfield is retiring this spring after 20 years as the dean of Columbia University’s School of Public Health. WNYC’s Fred Mogul attended a symposium this week to honor him.

REPORTER: Rosenfield dates his idealism to the Kennedy years. After medical school and military duty in the mid 1960s, he went to teach at a new medical school in Nigeria. Rosenfield had grown up the son of a prominent Cambridge, Massachusetts, obstetrician. He had always planned to follow in his father’s footsteps, but while overseas he decided to change course.

AR: I was gonna go back and sort of be taking care of middle- and upper-income women, and I thought: there are other people who can do that, I’d like to commit myself to women who are underserved and have big issues.

REPORTER: Rosenfield then went to Thailand for a year – and ended up staying for six. He worked on lowering the birth rate by introducing contraception to poor rural women. The experience taught him how dramatically they can improve their lives when they have the tools and knowledge to control birth. It also confirmed for Rosenfield that the best way for him to practice medicine wasn’t delivering babies.

AR: I came to the conclusion I could do more good dealing with the big issues than just one on one.

REPORTER: Rosenfield settled into Columbia’s Public Health School. He developed and expanded programs for treating women, both in Washington Heights and overseas. In 1985, he co-authored an influential paper highlighting the preventability of death during childbirth. As Professor Jeffrey Sachs explained on Thursday to a packed auditorium, Rosenfield persuasively demonstrated that the best way to improve maternal mortality was not, surprisingly, with better pre-natal care but with better emergency obstetric care for when things go wrong.

JS: Allen had put his finger on an issue of global priority that had been profoundly neglected.

REPORTER: One after the other, speakers described Rosenfield’s thoroughness as a scientist and his obsession with justice and equality. Bill Clinton said 1.3 million people worldwide who are HIV-positive now have access to anti-AIDS drugs – thanks, in part, to Rosenfield. The drugs have become cheaper recently, but a few years ago were widely considered too expensive for people in the developing world.

BC: At that time, Allen was one of the lone voices saying that people deserve a right to treatment, wherever they lived, whatever the color of their skin...Without his leadership there are an awful lot of people in the developing world today who would not be alive.

REPORTER: He became dean of the public health school in 1986. Over the next 20 years he grew the annual budget from 10 to almost 150 million dollars, recruiting dozens of faculty members, adding countless programs and increasing the student population from 400 to more than 900. Dr. Ian Lipkin was recruited by Rosenfield with a whole team to start a lab for emerging infectious diseases.

IL: This really was a major investment, because at the time, he didn’t have all the funds in place to put together a first class laboratory, but he was confident we could do this, and in a matter of about a year, we raised all the funding for it, and Allan was absolutely tireless.

REPORTER: Lipkin is one of perhaps hundreds of people who call the 73-year-old Rosenfield a mentor. They tell stories about him dropping everything to help with personal or professional challenges, sending emails in the middle of the night, taking calls on the ski slopes or tennis court. This ‘Corps’ of admirers has been eager, now, to help him -- since he was diagnosed last year with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. There isn’t much anyone can do. The fatal neuro-degenerative disease has been progressing quickly. Even so, he hardly seems to be slowing down, according to Columbia President Lee Bollinger.

LB: To maintain his focus on the school, on his public health programs, on his world programs, is a sign of just how committed this human being is to the well-being of other people.

REPORTER: At the end of the day, Rosenfield gingerly stepped onto the stage to a standing ovation. Wearing a Unicef tie and a wide grin, he thanked the speakers and made a few short comments. He criticized the lack of universal healthcare coverage in the United States. He cited Bangladesh, where more girls are in high school than boys, as an example of equality and hope. And he gave the last word to President Bush’s healthcare policy on sexually transmitted diseases.

AR: Finally, just a comment on abstinence. Some of you have heard me say this before: Abstinence is okay, if you use it in moderation.

REPORTER: Rosenfield plans to continue working on behalf of the school as long as possible. As he was heard to joke to one friend about fund-raising: “Just let them try to turn me down now.”

Links:

"Taking a Stand: Challenges and Controversies in Reproductive Health, Maternal Mortality, and HIV/AIDS"