Dr. Jean W. Pape Named to the Haitian National Order of Honour and Merit
Dr. Jean W. Pape has a new title: commander.
Dr. Pape, professor of medicine at Weill Cornell and founder and director of the Haitian Study Group on Opportunistic Infection and Kaposi's Sarcoma, or GHESKIO, was given his new rank on April 7, World Health Day. He was knighted and named to the National Order of Honour and Merit by President Michel Martelly of the Republic of Haiti during a ceremony at the National Palace.
The National Order of Honour and Merit is the highest national honor bestowed by the Haitian government. Dr. Pape was recognized for his pioneering work in Haiti in the fight against AIDS, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases, as well as his commitment to bolstering economic opportunities in Haiti through educating and mentoring children and adults.
Dr. Jean W. Pape, right, with President Michel Martelly
"It was a proud moment for me," Dr. Pape said. "You are recognized often from the outside, but rarely in your own country. I am appreciative of the fact that President Martelly was the first to recognize the work that GHESKIO and Weill Cornell have been doing for over 30 years."
That work began in 1980, when Dr. Pape and his mentor, Dr. Warren Johnson, co-director of the Center for Global Health at Weill Cornell, established a small unit at Haiti's State University Hospital to study and treat infantile diarrhea. In just one year, the unit reduced in-hospital mortality from 40 percent to 1 percent, and its success laid the groundwork for GHESKIO's establishment in 1982.
In the years since, GHESKIO, a nongovernment research and training center, recognized of "public utility" by the Haitian government, has been committed to providing integrated primary care services, including HIV counseling, AIDS care, prenatal care and management of TB, cholera and sexually transmitted infections. In 2010, GHESKIO opened a primary school for children ages 6-12 so that youngsters living in the slums of Port-au-Prince whose schools were destroyed in the earthquake could continue their education. These students receive free meals and health care, as well as health education. In addition to the primary school, GHESKIO established a vocational school to train young adults in construction and other trades and, with the support of Fondation Merieux from France, started a program that provides small loans to predominately women trainees to help them open their own businesses.
"We strongly believe that if we intervene in these areas through global health we can really change people's lives," said Dr. Pape, who has also been recognized by the United Nations, the French government, the Clinton Global Initiative and many more organizations. "We believe that we have to be on the front lines and create models that can be scaled up nationally. This is our duty, this is our responsibility, and we should not be confined to one disease. We should look at what is the best way to give the best chance to the poorest people."
Additional Awards and Honors
Sophie McKenney, a fifth-year M.D.-Ph.D. student, received an F30 fellowship from the National Institutes of Health for her research titled "Modeling Transformation from Myeloproliferative Neoplasms to Acute Myeloid Leukemia." Sophie hopes to create a mouse model of human disease that will enable her to determine the sequence of mutations that converts a group of hematological malignancies with relatively good prognosis, the myeloproliferative neoplasms, into a highly malignant disease, acute myeloid leukemia. Sophie is in the lab of Dr. Ross Levine at Sloan-Kettering and is a member of the Gerstner Sloan-Kettering Graduate School.