Penny Enarson

Penny Enarson is the Head of the Child Lung Health Division for the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease. Her background was originally nursing but from September 1994 to the present she has been head of the Child Lung Health Division of The Union and basically doing public health. She developed/adapted the Union’s health service delivery model which The Union developed for TB control which was adopted by WHO and renamed DOTS. She took this model and applied it to childhood lung diseases and through a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant implemented and tested it in Malawi over a 6 year period 2000 - 2005. The Child Lung Health Project’s (CLHP) main goal was to improve the survival and well being of children in Malawi. It is designed to establish a sustainable and reproducible system for the surveillance, diagnosis, and management of the respiratory diseases that afflict children, including acute respiratory infection (ARI)/pneumonia, tuberculosis, HIV related lung diseases and asthma, both in Malawi and other African countries. Through the Malawi experience she developed a generic model for the implementation of a child lung health programme that can be implemented with immediate effect in other resource poor countries leading to considerable savings in the lives of children living in those countries. This included developing training and monitoring materials. The Union only works within existing health services in collaboration with the country's ministry of health.