Member Highlight
For this month’s member highlight, we’re pleased to share the work of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz)
Member Spotlight: Fiocruz, A Watchdog for ID Outbreaks in Brazil
When it comes to responding to infectious diseases, GloPID-R member Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) has close to 120 years’ worth of experience. Fiocruz, headquartered in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with its strong scientific expertise plays an integral role in GloPID-R’s mission to coordinate research funding on a global scale.
For its work on infectious diseases, Fiocruz runs more than a thousand research and technological development projects on a range of diseases from AIDS, malaria and Chagas’ disease to meningitis and hepatitis. It also tackles other topics related to public health, including violence and climate change.
This august institution was instrumental in providing GloPID-R members an updated view of the Zika virus in Brazil and discussing the research advances and challenges. As a result of those exchanges, some GloPID-R members funded Zika research and then hosted a workshop in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 2016 to facilitate collaboration between members on Zika funded research projects.
Dr. Samuel Goldenberg, former Director of the Carlos Chagas Institute, Fiocruz’s representative in GloPID-R said: “Fiocruz is the largest Latin America institution devoted to public health. Thanks to the scope of its activities and experts, we are able to provide the support to efficiently tackle efficiently the health and social problems resulting from infectious diseases. Fiocruz is unique in the sense that we do research, development, production and health assistance”.
International collaboration and outreach remain one of Fiocruz’s strategic focuses. While it has regional research institutes in 10 states in Brazil, it also has an office in Maputo, Mozambique in Africa. In France, Fiocruz is the only Brazilian institution that belongs to the Pasteur World Network, and it maintains partnerships with the US’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Dr. Goldenberg said: “Fiocruz coordinates several international research and training activities and plays an important role in South-South health cooperation.”
With the support of the European Commission, Fiocruz coordinates the EU-LAC Health Project, including a consortium of organizations from various countries (Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Spain, Italy, Mexico, and Switzerland), aimed at policymaking to support cooperation in research and development.
Recently, Fiocruz Global Health Center (Cris/Fiocruz) was renamed as a Collaborating Center for Global Health and South-South Cooperation of the World Health Organization (WHO). A Collaborating Center of WHO is an institution designated by the Director-General of the institution to integrate an international collaborative network, carrying out technical activities and supporting programs in the area of health.
