Teaching Infectious Disease Pathology and Taking it To Africa

Abstract

With the advent of increasing emerging infectious diseases, rising antibiotic resistance, and the growing number of immunocompromised patients, there is increasing demand for infectious disease (ID) pathology expertise and microbiology testing. Currently, ID pathology training and emerging molecular microbiology techniques (eg, metagenomic next-generation sequencing and whole genome sequencing) are not included in the most American Council of Graduate Medical Education medical microbiology fellowship curricula, and not surprisingly, many institutions lack anatomical pathologists with expertise in ID pathology and advanced molecular diagnostics. In this article, we describe the curriculum and structure of the Franz von Lichtenberg Fellowship in Infectious Disease and Molecular Microbiology at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, MA. We emphasize the value of a training model that strives to integrate anatomical pathology, clinical pathology, and molecular pathology by providing examples in a case-based format and presenting selected metrics of the potential effect of such integrative ID pathology service and briefly describing opportunities and challenges of our global health efforts in Rwanda.

Keywords: fellowship; global health; infectious disease pathology; medical microbiology; teaching.