The American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene awarded its highest honor, the Bailey K. Ashford Medal, to Louise Ivers on December 4. The ASTMH selected Dr. Ivers, assistant professor of global health and social medicine, to recognize her service as a clinician and contributor to strengthening health systems in Haiti over the past eight years and particularly for her leadership in responding to the devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010, and the cholera outbreak that came in its wake. Dr. Ivers is Senior Health and Policy Advisor with PIH, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Associate Physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She conducted her work in Haiti with PIH, serving as leader of the HIV Equity Initiative, which has provided integrated HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention services to more than 8,000 rural patients over the last five years. She was also Clinical Director and then Chief of Mission with PIH in Haiti. Paul Farmer presented the award as co-founder of PIH. 

At the age of 26, Bailey K. Ashford, a physician with the U.S. Army Medical Corps, recognized in 1899 that hookworms caused the anemia prevalent among the rural populations of Puerto Rico. In 1904 he founded the Puerto Rico Anemia Commission to combat the disease. The ASTMH was founded in 1903 to promote global health through the prevention and control of infectious and other diseases that disproportionately afflict the global poor. The first Ashford Medal was awarded in 1941.

More information is available from PIH and from the Harvard Gazette.