Leading Women's Health Care Advocate Dr. Allan Rosenfield Dies

Main Category: Women's Health / Gynecology
Also Included In: HIV / AIDS
Article Date: 17 Oct 2008 - 5:00 PDT

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Dr. Allan Rosenfield, a leading advocate for women's health worldwide for more than 40 years, died Sunday at age 75 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the New York Times reports. Throughout his career, Rosenfield worked on issues related to women's reproductive health and human rights, strategies to address maternal AIDS-related deaths and family planning. According to the Times, Rosenfield's "most notable effort" likely was his involvement in a program to prevent mother-to-child HIV transmission, which to date has delivered health care to more than 500,000 women and infants.

Rosenfield in the 1960s worked with the Population Council as an advocate in Thailand, where he helped develop a national family planning program that trained midwives to prescribe birth control to women. He joined Columbia University's faculty in 1975 as a public health and ob-gyn professor, and he became the director of the school's Department for Population and Family Health. In a 1985 call to action published in the journal Lancet with Deborah Maine, Rosenfield wrote that emergencies in women's health were worsening and that physicians were focusing on infants at the expense of women and families. According to the Times, international health groups and policymakers in response to the call to action "began to focus on the universal shortage of maternal health care, including access to emergency obstetric care."

Rosenfield was appointed dean of Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health in 1986, where he organized global initiatives -- such as the Averting Maternal Death and Disability Program with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the International Center for AIDS Care and Treatment Programs with $125 million in funding from the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. In 2000, Rosenfield partnered with nine private foundations to start the MTCT-Plus Initiative to address mother-to-child HIV transmission. Rosenfield served as national chair of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America from 1985 to 1986 and was chair of the Program Board of the American Foundation for AIDS Research. Rosenfield also was instrumental in establishing community-based public health programs in Columbia's immediate neighborhood.

During a 2006 announcement that the public health school's main building would be named after Rosenfield, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger said, "Over the last three decades at Columbia, [Rosenfield] has not only inspired and trained generations of public health leaders, he has helped define what a school of public health should be" (Segelken, New York Times, 10/16).

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