To serve children under 16 who have suffered concussion from a non-sports- related injury, the University of Miami Sports Medicine Institute’s concussion program has launched its Pediatric Concussion Clinic, led by concussion expert Gillian Hotz, Ph.D. “Too often, younger children fall through the cracks and are not correctly diagnosed with concussion,” said Hotz.
For Peruvian native Julio Barredo, M.D., director of children’s cancer programs at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, visits to his home country were often painful. He saw a cure rate of only 40 percent for the 700 children diagnosed annually with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common childhood cancer. He knew that many of them were dying unnecessarily.
Buoyed by a $333,333 workforce development grant from the U.S. Health Resources & Services Administration, Robert C. Fifer, Ph.D., associate professor and director of audiology and speech-language pathology at the Mailman Center for Child Development, plans to set up a health care system to address diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of newborns with Zika infection in the St. Thomas, St. Croix and St. John islands.
