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Bringing Sustainability and Choices to Hospital Food

February 5, 2020  |  Nutrition and Obesity Post Comment

Alicia Henn, a cook in Seattle Children’s Forest Kitchen, helps serve healthy, sustainable food to patients, families and workforce members.

What do you think of when someone says, “hospital food” — green Jell-O anyone?

You probably don’t think of create-your-own omelets, barbecued chicken salads, street tacos or hand-tossed pizzas.

Hospital food has traditionally gotten a bad rap — and for many years it was deserved.

When Gina Sadowski, director of Nutrition, Culinary and Retail, started at Seattle Children’s more than 15 years ago, the food options in the hospital industry left something to be desired.

“Hospitals had very basic menus, heavily reliant on processed and convenience foods,” she said. “It was literally open a box, heat, serve.”

Since then, it has been Sadowski’s goal to change that at Seattle Children’s. Read full post »

Scientist Brings First-Hand Perspective to Fight Against Malaria

April 23, 2019  |  Research Post Comment

Drs. Nana Minkah (back) and Deba Goswami are working with their Kappe Lab colleagues to develop a vaccine for malaria.

Growing up in Ghana, a sub-Saharan country on the west coast of Africa, Dr. Nana Minkah, a scientist at the Kappe Lab, endured the unenviable “rite of passage” contracting malaria multiple times as a child.

While he doesn’t remember the early years when the associated high fever caused hallucinations, he has distinct memories of later bouts when he was bedridden for more than a week with pain and chills so bad his body visibly shivered.

The multiple malaria infections Minkah endured in his youth is common to those living in sub-Saharan Africa where the mosquito-transmitted parasitic infection is one of the deadliest diseases in human history. Despite tremendous attempts to rid the world of the malaria pathogens, it continues to sicken hundreds of millions and kills nearly half a million people each year. Malaria’s biggest toll is on children and pregnant women in developing countries.

That’s why, after Minkah completed his Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, he joined the Kappe Lab in 2015. Although he had no experience in parasitology, he wanted to work on malaria — a disease that continues to plague his homeland.

“I wanted to do work that has clinical implications with the potential to save the lives of people who look like me,” Minkah explained. Read full post »