The UT Southwestern Library is hosting Against the Odds: Making a Difference in Global Health, a traveling exhibition that highlights the role communities play in improving health at home and all around the world. The banner exhibit, which will be on display through October 6, 2012, explores the shared basic needs required for a good quality of life, including nutritious food and clean water, a safe place to live, and affordable health care.

Using historical and contemporary photographs, the banners tell stories of collaboration among families, scientists, advocates, governments, and international organizations, which all take up the challenge to prevent disease and improve medical care. The journey begins in Pholela, South Africa, where husband and wife team Sidney and Emily Kark developed a holistic approach to community health. Traveling on, the exhibition showcases the work of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee to teach mothers across the country Oral Rehydration Therapy, a lifesaving treatment for childhood diarrhea.

Other destinations include Brazil, where the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), or Landless Workers’ Movement, empowered poor citizens to begin subsistence farming on land left idle by agricultural corporations, and Central America, where the Pan American Health Organization launched Health as a Bridge to Peace to put an end to conflict and rebuild health care services.

As well as recent developments, the exhibit also focuses on historic campaigns that have changed today’s attitudes. The role of activists in the United States during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, for example, includes the work of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and the battles of Ryan White, the teenager who fought to attend school after contracting HIV through a blood transfusion.

This exhibit raises awareness of the sources and effects of health inequalities and invites each of us to join the global campaign for health and human rights. The experiences described here constitute a legacy of success, often based on the simplest means. Working together, we can make a world of difference.

An online web version of the exhibition, including an audio tour, and opportunities to get involved are also available.

This exhibition is brought to you by the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health.

Anne Freeman, M.S.P.H, director of UT Southwestern’s Community Prevention and Intervention Unit and Assistant Professor of Health Care Sciences in the School of Health Professions, will speak on “Changing HIV/AIDS: Reflections on 30 Years of Struggle and Hope” on Wednesday, August 22, at 12 noon in McDermott Plaza lecture hall D1.602. Professor Freeman’s presentation is free and open to the public; lunch will be served. Gordon Green, M.D., Professor of Family and Community Medicine and former director of the Dallas County Health Department, will host the forum.

Professor Freeman’s reflections are informed by a deep and varied experience of the AIDS crisis from the early 1980s, when a diagnosis was regularly followed by early death, to the present, where antiretroviral drugs have made AIDS, at least for some patients, a manageable chronic condition. For the past 26 years, Ms. Freeman has worked primarily in HIV prevention, including behavioral intervention development, research, training, and technical assistance. Previously she worked in cancer control and prevention, specifically breast, cervical, and endometrial cancer, and project management of economic program evaluation studies. Her HIV prevention work includes managing a large program that provides prevention services to persons with high risk behaviors: counseling, testing, and effective behavioral interventions. She has participated in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s seroepidemiology studies and CDC’s current expanded HIV surveillance studies. She is director of the Dallas STD/HIV Prevention Behavioral Intervention Training Center, one of 5 training centers nationwide funded by CDC to offer behavioral intervention training to STD and HIV prevention agencies and health departments, and the Capacity Building Assistance Center, which provides training and technical assistance to community-based organizations and health departments on effective behavioral HIV prevention interventions.

Pre-registration for the forum is not necessary. For more information, please contact John Fullinwider, 214-648-3801 or john.fullinwider@utsouthwestern.edu.