The National Institutes of Health, recipient of more than $10 billion in economic stimulus dollars, has been scrambling to push the money out the door through its Challenge Grants in Health and Science Research – and some of these grants will have major payoffs for global health. While much of the new funding is being directed at traditional biomedical research, including TB and tropical diseases, the NIH has been ingenious in its search for large projects that will create jobs and show results within two years. The most novel global health project: iCUROL.
In iCUROL’s first phase, thousands of recent college graduates with a concentration in global health who are having trouble finding gainful employment will be paid on a piece-rate basis to create Facebook profiles for every man, woman and child in the developing world. According to Dr. Ugo Bion, who developed the concept in the two weeks between the announcement of the funding opportunity and the deadline for proposals, “Global health degree programs have popped up at universities all over the country but with 401(k)s tanking, the old-timers in the field can’t retire. So we’ve got a huge oversupply of talented grads, and many of them have spent the last year doing little but perfecting their Facebook pages. Let’s put those skills to good use!”
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Bion expects to overcome the challenges posed by the lack of birth and death registration in developing countries by a partnership with the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. “If we don’t have people’s names, addresses or demographic characteristics, IHME has the state-of-the-art mathematical models that can impute them.”
In Phase II, approximately 3 billion iPhones will be distributed in low-income countries so individuals can access their Facebook pages and update their status minute-to-minute. (To comply with the spirit of the stimulus, Apple will move manufacturing operations from Shenzhen, China, to Flint, Michigan, although the unit price will increase by $150, with the need to market both hybrid and gasoline-powered models.) Outreach workers will then be deployed to demonstrate how to “friend” others, post pictures and create Facebook events. Within a matter of months, project designers expect massive new social networks to have been created across borders. “At that point,” says Bion, “we’ll begin to see the benefits. Based on my own personal experience, the more time you spend on-line, the less the opportunity there is to engage in risky behaviors, like sex.”
Social marketers and their supporting donors are seeing unprecedented opportunities in the iCUROL initiative, using microtargeting. Soon enough, far-flung citizen-consumer-patient-friends from Bangladesh to Burkina Faso will see healthful messages indicating, for example, the location of nearby latrines, updates on the latest AIDS services and new discounts at corner drugsellers dispensing AMFm-subsidized antimalarials.
Full operationalization of the virtual infrastructure will occur in Phase III. At that point, in collaboration with google.org, Facebook will track health-related content on Walls and status updates, in the hopes of detecting infectious outbreaks or hotspots of high-risk activities. Users will be encouraged to join Twitter, which will permit public health authorities to send inquiries to a virtual citizen’s army to monitor imminent risky behaviors. Using iPhone GPS and google earth technologies, community health workers can then be dispatched to intercede on the spot.
“This is a real win-win,” Bion says. “From the time we launch this project on April 1, young Americans committed to global health can stay right here, doing what they do best and stimulating the U.S. economy, while those in developing countries will learn valuable information-age skills that can protect them within a global health e-bubble. It’s hard to think of a better use for that money!”
For news about what happened on this date in history, see the April 1 posts from 2008 and 2007.
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CGD blog posts reflect the views of the authors, drawing on prior research and experience in their areas of expertise. CGD is a nonpartisan, independent organization and does not take institutional positions.
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