Residents of Nyanza Province in Western Kenya rely on subsistence fishing and farming and remain particularly vulnerable to food insecurity, poverty, and HIV infection. Photo by Katie Fiorella
Graduate student Kathryn Fiorella of the Brashares Lab spent the summer of 2011 exploring links between human health and the environment in Western Kenya.
Kathryn was one of eight students from four University of California campuses to receive a $5000 One Health Student Summer fellowship to conduct research responding to global health problems arising from the human-water-animal-food interface. Her project seeks to understand how resource access is vital to addressing issues of limited food access and under nutrition.
In her One Health Summer Research Project, she will explore these links between human health and the environment in Western Kenya where the residents of Nyanza Province rely on subsistence fishing and farming and remain particularly vulnerable to food insecurity, poverty, and HIV infection.
Focusing on issues of food access and nutrition, she will use public health, ecology, and sociology methods to analyze the critical role that resource access to the Lake Victoria fishery has in shaping nutritional status among a vulnerable group. Specifically, she will test the hypothesis that declining access to the Lake Victoria fishery resources will negatively affect nutritional status (anthropometric measures, hemoglobin levels) for people living with HIV/AIDS.
More information can be found here.