UA News

John Ehiri, a professor in the University of Arizona's Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, has joined the World Health Organization's advisory group in charge of studying foodborne diseases.

As trade, travel and migration increase, so does the spread of dangerous contaminants and pathogens in food across borders.

To study the foodborn diseases, the World Health Organization has convened an advisory group and named to the team John Ehiri, a professor in the University of Arizona's Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health. 

Tanja Kuchenmüller, a technical officer in the Department of Food Safety and Zoonoses with WHO, said Ehiri was invited to participate because of his extensive experience in knowledge translation.

For instance, diarrhoeal diseases alone – a significant proportion of which is foodborne – result in the deaths of 2.2 million people globally each year.

To quantify the extent of the burden of foodborne diseases, the World Health Organization, or WHO, launched the Initiative to Estimate The Global Burden of Foodborne Diseases.

Ehiri was invited to join the policy subgroup of the Foodborne Disease Burden Epidemiology Reference Group, or FERG, Country Studies Task Force to advance the translation of scientific evidence into policymaking. The policy subgroup will meet for the first time March 17 to March 20 in Atlanta, Ga. 

Collectively, the subgroup will develop training materials for countries and also advise on the development of protocols to analyze national policies and other content in three countries in each WHO region. These efforts are meant to aid help countries translate food safety-related research into policymaking.

Ehiri will be working alongside other professionals who are experts in political sciences, public health, social sciences, economics, training and education, communications and advocacy.

Also director of the Health Promotion Sciences Division in the College of Public Health, Ehiri is an expert in international maternal and child health.

Last year, "Maternal and Child Health:  Global Challenges, Programs, and Policies," edited by Ehiri was published. It was the first comprehensive book to be published about international material and child health and addressed the gap understanding ways that a mothers' health affects the development of their children.

The volume included articles written for students, researchers, policymakers, global health and development agencies.

Ehiri joined the UA in 2009 after having spent seven years at the University of Alabama at Birmingham's School of Public Health. There, Ehiri served as an associate professor focusing on material and child health.

Previously, he'd served at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in England as director of the Master of Community Health Program.

Originally from Nigeria, Ehiri earned a master's degree in public health in 1992 and his doctorate in 1997 from the University of Glasgow in Scotland. Also, Ehiri earned a master's degree in economics in health policy and planning from the University of Wales in the United Kingdom in 1994.