Health

In resource restricted areas of the world, the health of an ecosystem is cyclical to the health of the people that live in it. This concept, called global health, has been long understood by Centre ValBio.  For over 15 years CVB has had initiatives aimed at improving the health of the people that call the Ranomafana National Park Home. Additionally, we host yearly multiple research projects aimed at exploring improvements to human health for our friends and neighbors within the Ranomafana National Park catchment area. Our premier intervention in this area is facilitated by our CVB Health Team who have a dual role serving as provider of clinical care to remote populations, who otherwise have no healthcare access, while facilitating health-oriented research in line with CVB's core conservation mandate.

Clinical Care

The CVB Health Team has been in operation for the last 12 consecutive years, though its origins date back to the early 90s. This well-equipped team of Medical Doctors, Nurses, Midwifes, and Social Workers creates a mobile clinic, multiple times a year, in each of the 24 villages they visit a year. They provide a wide variety of services to the community including health and hygiene sensitization, disease treatment, family planning, malnutrition care, and community-oriented health intervention. 

Research

The health team also services as CVB's front line clinical research team, serving as liaison and interface point for research being conducted by a CVB researcher team while they are in the field. They are well trained for clinical research, with an intimate knowledge of our community’s needs, and have successfully conducted and presented important work on parasitic disease, Tuberculosis, Malaria, and many other types of illness.

Conservation Health oriented researchers are welcome at CVB with proper research proposal approval and IRB+/IACUC from your home institution, Madagascar Government approval and official permitting, community approval, and an on-campus review of the research you wish to conduct to ensure it is in line with our objectives and community standards. Those wishing to visit CVB for this sort of research should budget an additional three to four months beyond the standard four-month research review window for the extra procedures required. For more information on conducting this research contact us here.

 

Additional Health Interventions

In addition to CVB's Health Team, we yearly see clinical research and clinical intervention teams from a number of sources each year, covering all aspects of clinical health. This includes groups focused on: infectious disease research aimed at curative care for our populations, clinical and research-oriented parasitology, clinical dentistry, hereditary disease research, pharmaceuticals and traditional plant medicines, and epidemiology. At CVB we yearly see over a dozen projects oriented at human health from some of the most prestigious universities and research groups around the world. These groups provide tremendous value to the communities around the Ranomafana National Park and to support our core conservation mission. We thank each and every one of these groups for the contributions they provide in decoding disease and health crisis faced by our populations as it provides a critical link in ensuring our conservation mandates success.

A Magnet for Health

Since it's inception CVB has developed or attracted a number of partners to the area to conduct clinical care in the region. We are proud to now call these efforts partners, that work with us to ensure the long term ecological and human health of the Malagasy people. 

• In 2014 with the inspiration of CVB, a new NGO was created called PIVOT which has been a great boon to the local communities by strengthening local health infrastructure.
• The Stonybrook University School of Dentistry has hosted a program at CVB for the last decade. Annually they provide free and modern dental care to thousands of people in a region that faces a significant shortage of oral healthcare access.