|
Former Sylva physician now has worldwide focus
By Justin Goble
 Not many Jackson County residents can discuss health issues concerning both local folks and people half-a-world away, but Dr. Bill Aldis isn’t like most people.
Aldis, who formerly practiced in Sylva and still maintains his residence here, has been an adviser to the WorId Health Organization for more than 10 years. In his tenure he has spent a great deal of time in Southeast Asia working with public health officials throughout the region.
Aldis said his love for Asia blossomed early in his childhood, when he lived on the continent.
“I was born in India,” Aldis said. “My parents were missionaries there. So from a young age I was aware that there was a whole other world out there.”
Coming to the United States for college, he became a Jackson County transplant in the late 1970s after he graduated from medical school. While he and his partner, Dr. Bob Adams, were trying to get the Sylva Medical Center off the ground, Aldis frequently travelled abroad on public health missions for the WHO, he said. After a while, he said he couldn’t meet the demands of both.
“I had come here to start a full-time practice but ended up going away three or four times a year,” he said. “That was from 1977 to early 1993. Then it became impossible to do both. So I switched over full-time to the WHO. Ever since, I’ve been going back and forth between regions. I like the variety.”
Along with the travel, Aldis said he enjoys the challenges that arise from day to day. His work has definitely kept him on his toes, he said.
“Every time I go to a new country, there’s a new set of problems,” he said. “It’s a different culture, a different language, different public health issues. You have to be flexible. A lot of what I do is anticipating problems. Governments do 90 percent of that, but we do some extensive anticipation. We bring knowledge from other parts of the world. I kind of run around and fix things and try to keep them from going wrong.”
One of the biggest challenges is dealing with new diseases and outbreaks, Aldis said. Very often he has to deal with something that he has no knowledge of. While that aspect of the job is something he can’t prepare for, Aldis said he’s learned to cope.
“In my work, not a single week goes by without something coming across my desk that I know nothing about,” Aldis said. “I usually have to respond. I’m the world’s biggest Google user. I do have a good education, but I’ve been dealing with diseases no one has ever dreamed of. You have to have an open-ended education, since you’re looking at the things that drive the processes.”
One such disease is avian flu, which has become the concern of health officials throughout the world. Though he acknowledges it is a major problem, Aldis said the public may be misguided in putting all of their attention on it or any other single disease.
“I think focusing on one disease is more of a headline thing,” Aldis said. “I’d like it if people thought about public health in general. Jackson County’s Health Department is looking at stuff like that, and most people don’t even know it’s there. If we had an outbreak of bird flu or another disease here, they would be the center of activity. We really need to look at the systems in place.
“The participating nations in the WHO have pledged $1.9 billion to the organization,” Aldis said. “It would be horrible to spend all of that in one place. We really need to look at the things that make people sick. Part of my job is to make sure the right thing is done instead of doing the thing that’s politically attractive.”
Though he thinks bird flu will hit America “very soon,” Aldis said a lot of work is being done across the globe that can be beneficial to doctors here.
“The work I do in Asia has a huge impact on the U.S.,” Aldis said. “We’ve been tracking bird flu, and there have been many human cases in Thailand. We’re looking at how it spreads, and the things we learn we can share with the world. I may be far away physically, but I can help out. A large part of what I do has an impact.”
The big issue Aldis and his colleagues are dealing with is looking at how the disease spreads, he said. One of the major factors is international travel, which Aldis said has been a big factor in the spread of many diseases.
In the past, travel took much longer, which allowed diseases to show before a vessel reached its destination and made a quarantine possible, he said, adding that isolating patients is much harder in today’s fast paced world.
“There’s this whole global mixing effect that’s been going on,” Aldis said. “But people are susceptible to the same things. Air travel changed a lot of things, especially mass air travel. We have people going from everywhere to everywhere.
“I was in Nigeria in 1995, and the minister of health came into my office,” he said. “He was worried about an outbreak of bubonic plague in Gujerat, India. I was wondering why he was so worried, but I found out that there were around 30 arrivals per day into Nigeria from Gujerat. That meant in 10 days, 300 people came into Nigeria who could have had the bubonic plague.”
Along with these facts, Aldis said planes are places where diseases spread quickly and easily, since they are enclosed environments.
“During a SARS outbreak, there was a flight to Hong Kong from Beijing,” he said. “One person had a cough, and 22 people ended up getting SARS. Four people died, and none of them were sitting close to that one person. We shouldn’t shut down airports, though. We need a more dynamic approach to disease control.”
Along with this, Aldis said he and other WHO officials are following the disease and trying to anticipate any new outbreaks or mutations.
Even though the WHO expects things to get worse, Aldis remains optimistic. Though he said the world is in “an odd state,” organizations like the WHO are doing what they can to make it a safer place.
“There are more healthy people now than there have ever been in recent history,” he said. “There’s a lot of progress. I don’t get discouraged. It’s all a question of attitude.”
|
