E.C. Glass grad to research anemia during trip to Africa

By Cynthia Pegram

Published: May 15, 2008

If you go looking for Ben Milam this summer, better check the travel costs before you start.

Milam, of Lynchburg, is a University of Virginia medical student selected as a 2008 Global Health Scholar. He’s headed to South Africa for research on anemia.

Some 33 scholars for 2008 will be involved in projects worldwide through the UVa’s Center for Global Health. Their academic fields include medicine, anthropology, religious studies, bioethics and nursing.

Milam’s project is the next generation of one begun by a 2007 Global Health Scholar who was looking for relationships between specific infectious disease and anemia.

“He didn’t find a relationship, but he found an exorbitantly high rate of anemia in this community in South Africa,” Milam said.

“Our project is establishing a cause of the anemia. He did children only; our project is going to do 50 mother-child pairs,” he said.

The children will be from six months to 60 months old.

Milam will work on the project with three other UVa medical students; they’ll be north of Johannesburg, South Africa, for seven to eight weeks in clinics in a mostly urban community.

Research will include taking a drop of blood from the fingertip to assess hemoglobin content, as well as looking at nutrition and diet and infectious disease. Information about food intake, for example, can help determine if the anemia is linked to low consumption of meat.

In addition, hair samples will be taken back to UVa — a stable isotope lab there can detect molecular signatures from carbon, which can provide information about diet, said Milam. That analysis, done under the guidance of Dr. Stephen Macko, is the same kind that drew attention to Macko’s work when he analyzed hair samples taken from a 5,300-year-old frozen man found in the Alps in the early 1990s.

Although this is Milam’s first work in Africa, the 2002 E.C. Glass High School graduate has worked in U.S. settings of high poverty or need since high school.

And he is interested in research. As a UVa undergrad and a biochemistry major, he’s worked on cancer research in his senior year.

He took a year off between college and medical school, working at Northwestern in Chicago, this time on research involving a well-known cancer drug in a combination treatment for pancreatic cancer.

He’s now completed his first year of medical school, and while he wanted to do research again, he wanted it to be working with people — and if possible, to go abroad.

“I talked to the center for Global Health, they linked me up with Jim Heckman,” the 2007 Global Health Scholar who originated the project, Milam said.

This will be his first trip to Africa, or any developing country.

“I’m really excited about that, and being exposed to a new culture, and a new environment. I hope to learn so much from it. Hopefully, it’s the beginning of a long career in global health.”

That doesn’t mean he’s yet settled on a specialty. “I think as a physician, I can always be involved in global health. It doesn’t matter what field I’m going into.”

Milam is headed for a 2011 graduation from medical school, but he hasn’t forgotten his Lynchburg years at Glass.

“Glass definitely set me up to succeed at UVa as an undergrad, which set me up for medical school,” Milam said. “They built a strong base for me. Without E.C. Glass’s foundation, I think it would have been a lot harder.”