Boise, Idaho family physician Dr. Jeffrey Edwards is always watching out for the signs of common infectious diseases like the flu and pneumonia when patients come to see him. As a World Health Organization consultant, he also looks out for the less common illnesses like mpox, a virus that causes painful skin blisters, fever and sometimes death.
Mpox used to only be found in Africa, but has spread to 80 countries and is currently a WHO health emergency. The disease emerged in Idaho in 2022 and 2023 and continues to be only a plane or car ride away from showing up in a patient in Edward’s Boise-based practice.
Edwards, chief medical officer at Full Circle Health, a Boise-based health provider and teaching center, is ready for those patients because he relies on WHO infectious disease data, to maintain vigilance against seemingly remote diseases that could impact his patients.
We spoke with Edwards about how the WHO has benefited his patients in Idaho and how it is supporting physician care across the U.S.
Answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Tell us about your consulting role with the World Health Organization and how it came to be?
Edwards: I went to the University of Washington for med school in the 80’s and early 90’s and came to Boise to do my residency in family medicine and rural care. Then I moved to Texas and started to do some faith-based work in Central America and really enjoyed that. So, I decided to go to Johns Hopkins to get my master’s in public health focused on international health and quality improvement and decided to join Doctors Without Borders. I was part of the Ebola outbreak response in Africa in 2014 and did a lot of monitoring and evaluation work and then ended up doing consulting work for the WHO. I moved back to Boise to join the residency faculty but also stayed connected to the WHO because I wanted to teach my students about how multiple countries approach policy solutions for improving health outcomes.
Can you give an example of that policy system approach and how did it help your residency students in Boise and Americans more broadly?
Edwards: I was working a lot on antimicrobial resistance [the term for drug-resistant infections]. And so we worked in countries like Nepal, Ghana, Columbia, Sierra Leone, where antimicrobial resistance is a much bigger problem than the U.S. And we looked at how we could reduce the frequency of antibiotic resistance in those countries with better treatment protocols. I could share that experience with my students who were really interested in understanding what is happening in global health because they know it can help them care for future patients. Further, the WHO’s work on antibiotic resistance helps Americans because stopping these bug-resistant illnesses in other countries reduces the chances of drug-resistant infections spilling over and emerging in the U.S.
Tell me more about how you use WHO data in your health system and practice?
Edwards: I continue to monitor all things infectious disease-related across the country and globally because Idaho has lots of international travelers and people who come from LA, and New York who have had contact with lots of people from international settings. Having the data from the WHO gives us vision as a health system for what might be coming and allows us to prepare as a system, and that is why we need to continue to support the work of the WHO.
Is there a specific example of how you used WHO data recently?
Edwards: There is an outbreak of mpox in the Congo and so we have an alert out across our system to watch for it. It’s not unusual for somebody to come from Africa, or southeast Asia and arrive within two days and potentially bring an infectious disease here, so we have to keep our eye on the ball. Two years ago, we had mpox cases here that we managed because we received a heads up from the WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to watch for it. We were able to put in screen protocols when we started seeing it here in Boise. We were ready when it showed up because we had that information.