Michael Linnan

Born a US citizen, Mike has spent most of his professional life working in international health and development in Asia and Africa. Trained initially as an engineer, he returned to medical school and did a residency in Internal Medicine in the Harvard hospital system before completing a fellowship in public health training at the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

Mike joined CDC as permanent staff in 1984 and spent the next twenty years in the international health division at CDC. He was seconded for much of his CDC career to development and health agencies such as USAID, WHO and UNICEF working in Africa and Asia. He helped develop many of the programs collectively known as child survival, such as breast feeding, growth monitoring, immunizations, oral rehydration therapy, and safe motherhood. He was active in defining the HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis co-epidemic and the public health response.

Along with the work in health and development, he has been active in disaster medicine and remediation, with time spent in Sudan and Ethiopia during the Sahel Famine disaster and work in Indonesia on earthquake, volcano and tsunami disasters.

Mike spent much of his career developing health capacity in the countries he was assigned to, starting public health and epidemiology training programs in Uganda, Zimbabwe, Taiwan, Thailand, Philippines, and Indonesia. In his last posting before retiring from the CDC, he spent 5 years in Vietnam, where he helped start the Hanoi School of Public Health.

In Vietnam, he led a partnership with CDC, UNICEF and the Hanoi School of Public Health to fully define the leading causes of mortality and morbidity for Vietnamese children and adults. The effort showed that non-communicable diseases, especially injury, were the leading killers of children after infancy, adolescents and adults through middle age. The research showed that drowning was a leading cause of death in children and young adults.

Following his retirement from the US CDC, he co-founded a non-profit foundation, The Alliance for Safe Children and became the technical director. At TASC, he oversaw the largest set of national mortality and morbidity surveys ever conducted at the community level in seven countries in Asia (Vietnam, Bangladesh, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, China and Cambodia). The surveys showed that injury is the leading killer and disabler of children in Asia after infancy, with drowning the leading cause of injury death in childhood after infancy.

Through TASC, Mike helped establish community laboratories to develop injury prevention programs that focus on effectivess and sustainability in Vietnam, Thailand, China and Bangladesh. Much of the research has focusd on drowning prevention in children. Areas of research have been understanding the behaviors and cultural factors that mediate drowning risk, and age-, sex-, and environment-specific factors that can be addressed with interventions, and testing the effectiveness and sustainability of different intervention strategies. A major emphasis has been mediators of prevention effectiveness in low resource settings, and how drowning risk and prevention differs in low and middle income countries (LMICs) compared to high income countries (HICs).

Mike has published extensively on drowning with his research collaborators, addressing drowning epidemiology in LMICs, and differences in prevention for LMIC drowning versus HIC drowning. Other areas of research have been whether swimming ability is protective—either naturally acquired or formally taught, the role of resuscitation in community response in LMICs, effectiveness of creche and daycare in rural LMICs for drowning and other injury prevention, and cost-effectiveness of different drowning and other injury intervention strategies in LMICs.

An early advocate for child injury prevention in LMICs, Mike has been active in child injury research in LMICs for over two decades, He continues to be active in development of drowning interventions with an emphasis on safety and high quality evidence collection matters unique to the low resource environments of LMICs.