Personal Statement from Dr. Gasana

Long before Janvier Gasana was a teacher, he was a boy growing up in Runda, Rwanda. He has come a long way from that “little bitty area” near Rwanda’s capital city of Kigali, but his memories of a homeland lost infuse his work today and drive him to greater challenges.

Hailing from a long line of traditional healers who maintained an interest in Western Medicine, Gasana gained an appreciation early on for the art of healing. His grandmother, Asterie, a traditional healer, died on October 3, 2006 at the age of 106 years. Although she was blind the last 6 years of her life, people were still coming to her to be healed. Gasana excelled academically and was accepted into the minor seminary, where he completed his high school education. He then attended medical school at the National University of Rwanda. He had planned to open a clinic in the capital city of Rwanda when he graduated in 1984, but the dean of the medical school handpicked him to join the medical school faculty, assigning him to the environmental and occupational hygiene department.

This turned out to be a perfect fit for the man who grew up idolizing his grandmother, a healer, and an older cousin, Antoine, a teacher. After four years on faculty, Gasana was required to pursue an advanced degree, which is how he, along with his wife and four children (an older son and triplets), wound up at the University of Illinois at Chicago. While working on his doctorate in public health, Gasana returned to Rwanda with the triplets to conduct research. It was during this time that his homeland imploded from a vicious civil war, and he narrowly escaped getting shot while retrieving water samples from the Nyabarongo River, the source of the Nile River. The narrow escape was a reality check, and he left the country in tears in September 1993 with a terrible sense of foreboding. Six months later, the Rwandan president’s plane was gunned down and his army went on a rampage, killing 500,000 people in six weeks. Gasana said the victims were mostly educated people (including roughly half of his medical school colleagues), their families and others labeled “enemies,” most of who were from the minority ethnic group. He immediately sought asylum in the beautiful land of the United States, where people have rights and freedom – things that people in his homeland have given up on.

Gasana’s graduate research made him aware of Chicago’s serious lead poisoning problem, and when he moved to Miami, he asked officials at the Miami-Dade County Health Department if he could look at their data. What he found disturbed him: Liberty City, Little Haiti and eastern Little Havana accounted for a disproportionately high amount of the county’s reported lead poisoning cases. In this Pilot Study on Lead Poisoning in Miami, lead inspections were performed and blood samples analyzed with shocking results: Nearly two-thirds of the sites in the study returned one or more samples with lead levels that greatly exceeded Environmental Protection Agency guidance standard.

When pilot study results were published in The Miami Herald, offers of help came pouring in from the community. With seed money, Gasana formed a non-profit organization, Florida Alliance to Eradicate Childhood Lead Poisoning (FAECLP) which later changed its name to Florida Children’s Environmental Health Alliance (FCEHA) to reflect its newly expanded research agenda in the area of pediatric environmental epidemiology.

He has been tirelessly dealing with this issue of childhood lead poisoning which is one of the issues stemming from poverty, environmental justice, and health disparities. This work has led him to look into other children’s environmental health hazards including environmental triggers of asthma in indoor and outdoor environments; other toxic metals such as mercury; pesticides; and the built environment in Miami inner city. During his sabbatical leave (Academic Year 2005-2006) he expand his research on inner city children’s environmental health. This is a logical expansion of his research on childhood lead poisoning since any time he went into the old home, he not only found peeling lead-based paint and air / dust loaded with lead, but also he frequently smelt the ETS (environmental tobacco smoke) or saw cockroaches, and the mildew building up in some of these homes and in a number of cases, there would be a child suffering from asthma.He is now busy preparing a Major Study on Environmental Triggers of Childhood Asthma in Miami.