Please note this is a hybrid event - you have the option to attend in person or virtually. Registrations are required for all attendees. For in-person attendees, the event will run from 11:45 am - 2 pm and will include lunch. The live stream will begin at 12:55 pm (virtual attendees will be sent a link for the event via email).
Join DACOR and UAA for a conversation with Dr. Charles "Ok" Pannenborg on the impact of plastics. Every day there are reminders that plastics are everywhere, in the water, land and air, posing problems for both developing and developed countries. In December, a UN-sponsored conference failed to reach agreement on a global plastics treaty. Differences centered on the vast amounts of plastics produced, the waste that must be disposed of, where it goes, who should pay, what recycling by the private and/or public sector could reduce the problem, and so forth. Dr. Ok Pannenborg, formerly the World Bank's Chief Health Scientist, is a frequent member of many important U.S. and international health commissions. He has been actively calling attention to an under-addressed aspect of this problem - the impact of micro and nano plastics on our health, whether linked to severe diseases of unknown origin, to reproductive health and declining human fertility, and to wider policy implications.
Ok Pannenborg has been active in global health for over fifty years. He lived and worked in many countries in Africa and Asia, working, among others, on malaria and leprosy, vaccines & drug development, reproductive health and medical technology innovation. He served as a director at the Pan-American Health Organization/WHO, as the Chairman of the Netherlands Commission on Global Health Research, and was a co-founder of the Roll-back-Malaria partnership. He created the first sector-wide health program in the the world (in the 1980s in Bangladesh), and was the first to introduce and apply scenario-analysis in health policy and systems (1981). He served on the boards of the Tropical Disease Research Program, the Onchocerciasis program, IntraHealth International and many other public and private global health organizations and agencies, as well as on the global health committees of National Academies of Sciences.
In his early career he worked for the NGO Terre-des-Hommes and UNHCR (DR Congo), WHO (Bangladesh), the Dutch NIH (seconded to the Pakistan NIH in Rawalpindi as a vaccine advisor) and the Netherlands Ministries of Health and Foreign Affairs (as their first global health advisor and strategic policy chief).
He joined the World Bank in 1985, where he rose through the ranks in the Bank’s Asia and Africa Operations divisions and later served as the Bank’s Chief Health Advisor (at Director level) and its Chief Health Scientist. He chaired the World Bank's Pandemic Committee between 2003 and 2009 and was closely involved in the global Ebola response. He retired from the Bank a decade ago.
Dr. Pannenborg has published several books and many articles in the various fields of global health, and graduated in law and in international (health) relations (University of Groningen, Netherlands), tropical medicine and public health (University of Toronto and University of Amsterdam), and business (Harvard Business School). He continues to remain engaged professionally in selected global health priorities, most recently in the field of risk analysis of micro- and nano-plastics for human health, disease and fertility. He is a national of the Netherlands.
Location
Setting: Hybrid DACOR Bacon House OR Online 1801 F Street, NW Washington, DC 20006 UNITED STATES
