Did I Make The Right Decision?

I often serve as advisor to graduate students; for some I am their assigned academic advisor and for others I am someone they can talk with and seek guidance from.  I always tell them that once they have thoroughly thought through a problem, weighing all the factors, and made a decision based on the best knowledge available at the time, they should not later second guess themselves.  That still seems like good advice.  However, since making a decision last Friday after an especially frustrating series of events, I am having second thoughts and regretting a decision I made.  Here is the situation:

My boss, Dean Philip Nasca, and I left Albany on a Continental flight to Newark's Liberty Airport Friday afternoon at 1:10 on the first leg of a trip that would take us first to Hong Kong then on to Hanoi for meetings there related to a major chronic disease surveillance project we are planning to undertake with Vietnamese colleagues.  This project will involve not only colleagues in Hanoi at a number of health agencies and university centers but also colleagues from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst School of Public Health.  David Buchanan from Amherst was leaving from Boston and would meet us in Hanoi.  After we finished our meetings in Hanoi, Phil and I were going on to Siem Reap, Cambodia, where we would visit The Global Child, a not-for-profit program to educate street children in that city.  We would be returning to Albany on March 1.

Friday was an unusually warm February day with temperatures eventually rising to 60 degrees once the sun came out.  It was also very windy, not only in Albany but throughout the Northeast.  Our flight would normally take 30 minutes from Albany to Newark.  Our itinerary gave us 50 minutes from landing in Newark to the take-off of the Homg Kong flight so we knew it was cutting it close but we were told the flight to Hong Kong would leave from the same terminal and that should provide "plenty of time"  for us to make it as well as for our luggage to get transferred.

Before we took off we were told that due to strong winds air traffic control was asking us to sit on the tarmac for clearance, a delay of 20 minutes expected.  Twenty minutes later we were airborne.  As we approached the airport in Newark, our flight crew was asked to circle, another delay of another 20 minutes and this made us nervous because time was ticking away and it looked like there was no way we would land at the scheduled time, 2:40, and we could miss our 3:30 connection but the flight attendants were optimistic that we'd make it.  Several other passengers also had tight connections and were getting nervous.  Then as we approached the airport, a third delay was announced and we began circling again for another 10 minutes.  Once on the ground, the tension continued to build as the trip to a gate was torturously slow and halting but the kicker was when we arrived at the gate and no gate agent was there to roll the jetway to the plane:  another wait of 15 minutes began and now tensions were very high.  As soon as we were allowed to leave the plane, we had less than 15 minutes to run the 50 gates to the gate for the flight to Hong Kong--we arrived at the gate in time to see the plane backing out and the doors closed.  Arrgghh!!!

That's when decision time began.  A trip to the Continental "service center" was about as frustrating--long lines due to many missed connections and lots of irate people sharing stories  of their experiences.  Once we got to the head of the line, we were told that we could get a flight out on the next day's flight to Hong Kong--there were two seats left (both middle seats which would not be very comfortable on a 16 hour flight) but they could not guarantee that we would then be able to get an onward flight to Hanoi before the middle of this week.  What to do?  Phil said he was not going to go on but certainly I should go if I was willing to take the chance on getting to Hanoi in time to have it be meaningful.  By this time my right knee was throbbing (I had wrenched it the weekend before playing in the snow with my great-grandsons and the run through the airport had aggravated it); the thought of sitting on a plane the next day for 16 hours in a middle seat combined, I admit, with my frustration with Continental and our travel agent who had issued the tickets for such a brief window of time and putting us in this situation, was topmost and I bailed too.  We cancelled our trip and came back to Albany that night.  We assumed that David had been able to leave from Boston and would represent us in Hanoi which would at least make all the planning and arrangements done there worthwhile for our Vietnam colleagues.  And, we reasoned, we have a trip to Sun Yat-sen University in China coming up in June; we can add to that itinerary and visit both Hanoi and Siem Reap during that trip (and reduce the overall costs).  We learned many lessons; one of them is to not accept what your travel agent does without questioning it and overruling it in a case like this.  There was an earlier morning flight from Albany to Newark that day.  If we had taken that, we would have had some down time sitting around in the Newark airport but we also would have made the flight to Hong Kong and onward to Hanoi and Siem Reap. 

Now, of course, when my knee is feeling so much better and I have calmed down, I think it was a bad decision to bail out of the onward trip.  I could have found an inexpensive hotel in the area around the  Newark airport for overnight, taken the flight to Hong Kong on Saturday (who knows, perhaps I would have been able to get an aisle seat at flight time) and taken my chances on getting a flight to Hanaoi by Tuesday latest.  Oh, the cognitive struggle . . .  What do you think I should have done?

The Peace Corps Is About to Gain Some Outstanding Volunteers

Our School was the first State University of New York (SUNY) institution to become a partner with the Peace Corps (PC) through the PC Masters International (MI) Program.  Under this program, students work toward their Master of Public Health (MPH) degree and volunteer for the Peace Corps; their 27 month PC experience fulfills their 9 credits of MPH internship requirement.  In the fall we enrolled our first MI cohort, three outstanding women who are completing their second semester of MPH coursework and are preparing to leave for their PC assignments in May.  They are Aline, an epidemiology major; Liz, an environmental health major; and Jean, a biomedical sciences major.  Jean has learned that she will be going to Ethiopia where her assignment will be attached to the Ministry of Health; Liz, who speaks French fluently, is going to Togo; and Aline continues to await her assignment but she hopes it might be to a Central or South American country.

These three women were among the dozen students who traveled to Costa Rica with us in January on a study abroad tour.  They are all very well traveled, have had excellent academic and practical preparation for the Peace Corps experiences and the challenges that lie ahead.  They will be outstanding assets to the countries they are assigned to and everyone at the School and within the University system will take great pride in their accomplishments.  We wish them well and, with their permission, I will keep you informed of their adventures.  (The best think about being the MI Coordinator for our School is the opportunity to visit them once they get settled in their assignments!  I'm aleady saving my pennies so I can visit Ethiopia, Togo, and one more country next year!)





Aline and me in Costa Rica

 






Liz, Jean, and their classmate Kayla in Costa Rica

 

Food Safety in a Globalized World

A couple of weeks ago I attended a symposium sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)entitled "Food and Drugs:  Can Safety Be Ensured in a Time of Increased Globalization?"  This symposium, like all of those I have attended that have been sponsored by CFR, was outstanding.  It was "on the record" so anything I relate in this my first blog is okay to share with you.  The audience (about 150 were registered and listed in the program) was a mix of those representing multinational pharmaceutical companies, academic institutions, consumer protection organizations, global security agencies, risk analysts, and government officials.  Margaret Hamburg, Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a woman I have admired greatly for many years, was the keynote presenter, setting the stage for the remainder of the meeting.  She indicated that 20 to 25% of all consumer purchases are now food and drug products and 80% of our drug ingredients come from abroad (40% of our finished pharmaceutical products come from abroad).  We definitely need a global alliance of regulators to ensure safety of these products.  One of the most startling statistics provided was that only 1% of all food and drug imports are inspected by U.S. officials and there is concern that, with proposed budget cuts, this percentage with drop even lower.  We were told that a recent study of a cheeseburger produced by a well known fast food vendor involved products--meat, cheese, lettuce, tomato, sauces, and bread--from 54 countries!

The program consisted of three very knowledgeable panels that discussed policy challenges and potential solutions.  It's obvious that we as consumers must demand safe food and drugs.  I am reminded that "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair was written in 1906 to expose the poor working conditions of those laboring in the meat packing plants of Chicago, a novel that led to the establishment of the Pure Food and Drug Laws and the FDA.  One recommendation to protect our current food and drug supply was based on a system for tracking any specific product using technology available and used by finacial institutions to track our credit card usage.

As a public health educator, I am indebted to CFR for all their wonderful programs.  This semester my global health course is "Public Health in Film and Fiction."  Our first class was based on the book and film "The Constant Gardener" and our second class focused on "The Jungle" as well as the film "Food, Inc."  The CFR symposium was perfectly timed for me and my students.  I send kudos to Richard Haas, the Council President, and Laurie Garrett, CFR Senior Fellow for Global Health, for an outstanding program.




Margaret Hamburg, FDA Commissioner

 


Laurie Garrett, Senior Fellow for Global Health,
 Council on Foreign Relations