Volunteers from the University's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) and Hands-on Bay Area came together last night for "Bring Me A Book" Volunteer Night. The event took place at the Bring Me A Book headquarters in nearby Mountain View, where the volunteers had dinner and learned about the organization.

Denise Masumoto, Shorenstein APARC's manager of corporate relations, headed the 20 volunteers from APARC, who are visiting fellows doing research at Stanford for a year and represent countries including China, India, Japan and the Philippines. Masumoto said APARC became affiliated with the Bring Me A Book Program when she found the program online and thought it represented an integral part of American lifestyle and culture. She also hoped that it could "encourage the visiting fellows to volunteer in other ways in their own countries."

"It is an honor to host the students of Stanford's Asia-Pacific Research Center," said Bring Me A Book volunteer coordinator and community outreach manager Montez Davis. "Since many of these volunteers have families, this is the perfect way for them to experience first hand the difference you can make in the future success of a child all through volunteer work."

Bring Me A Book began with Judy Koch's mission to provide easy access to the best childrens' books and to inspire reading aloud with children. The foundation aims to provide brand-new books of the best quality to children who do not have the means to obtain them otherwise.

"We believe that every child deserves books of the same quality," said Bring Me A Book office manager Erin Smith.

Bring Me A Book is affiliated with volunteer corporations such as CISCO, Google and Starbucks, as well as other non-profit organizations. Hands-on Bay Area is a non-profit organization that aims to make volunteer work easy and accessible, organizers said.

Davis hosted the event along with Donovan Cook '66, director of development for Bring Me A Book. The pair began by giving the volunteers a brief tour around the headquarters and updating the volunteers on their latest plans.

The organizers mentioned projects including the recent distribution of Karen Ehrhardt's This Jazz Man to Oakland Public Schools like the Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary School and the recent openings of Bring Me A Book in places such as Hong Kong, Malawi, Mexico and the Philippines.

David L. Heymann, assistant director-general for communicable diseases and the director general's representative for polio eradication at the World Health Organization (WHO), has joined CISAC as a consulting professor.

Heymann has dedicated much of his career as a medical doctor to investigating and fighting the spread of infectious diseases and mobilizing global efforts to prevent pandemics.

"Dr. Heymann's expertise on threats to health security is a welcome addition to CISAC," Siegfried Hecker, CISAC co-director, said. "He is deeply knowledgeable about the most severe disease-related threats as well as how best to build cooperative international efforts to reduce these threats."

Prior to assuming his current position at WHO, Heymann served as executive director of WHO's Communicable Diseases Cluster, which includes programs on infectious and tropical diseases. In that position, he oversaw the response to Severe Accute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003.

Before joining WHO, Heymann worked for 13 years as a medical epidemiologist in sub-Saharan Africa, on assignment with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. While there, he participated in investigating both the first outbreak of Ebola, in Yambuku (then Zaire) in 1976, and the second outbreak, in Tandala, in 1977. He directed the international response to the Ebola outbreak in Kikwit in 1995. Heymann also spent two years as a medical officer in the WHO smallpox eradication program in India prior to 1976.

Heymann spent two weeks in residence at Stanford last spring, co-hosted by CISAC and FSI, during which he delivered a a talk in FSI's Payne Lecture series. In the lecture, titled "Infectious Diseases across Borders: Public Health Security in the 21st Century," he discussed the collective responsibility to defend public health. He surveyed WHO's efforts to fight emerging and re-emerging infectious disease on every continent.

Among those efforts is a global network of scientists who monitor and collect viruses, sending samples to four WHO collaborating centers for analysis and tracking. This network detected the novel virus H5N1, known as avian flu, in 1997, a disease WHO continues to track closely.

Currently, Heymann said, the H5N1 virus is in the third of six phases in WHO's pandemic alert system, meaning that there have been cases of human infection but "no, or very infrequent, human-to-human spread."

Heymann emphasized, "It is important to prevent the disease at the source." At the same time, WHO is working to "provide universal access to vaccines," which, while not eliminating the disease, "will prevent sickness," he said.