James Chin facts for kids

James (Jim) Chin is an American expert in public health. He studies how diseases spread and how to prevent them. He has spent much of his career focusing on diseases like AIDS.

What Jim Chin Does

Jim Chin is a public health epidemiologist. This means he studies how diseases affect large groups of people. He works to track and stop the spread of diseases, especially those that can be passed from person to person.

Early Career

From 1961 to 1964, Jim Chin was a research fellow. He worked in San Francisco, USA, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. After that, he was a research epidemiologist in California from 1964 to 1967.

From 1968 to 1987, he worked for the California State Department of Health Services. He led teams that controlled the spread of diseases. For many years, he was in charge of the infectious disease section.

Fighting AIDS Globally

In the early 1980s, Jim Chin started studying the AIDS pandemic. A pandemic is a disease that spreads across many countries. He helped track and control diseases in California.

From 1987 to 1992, he worked at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland. There, he helped create ways to track and understand HIV/AIDS around the world. He led the unit that watched how HIV/AIDS was spreading and what its effects were.

Consulting and Teaching

After leaving WHO in 1992, Jim Chin became an independent consultant. He worked with different international groups. His job was to check how HIV was affecting people in developing countries, mostly in Africa and Asia. Some of the groups he worked with include UNAIDS, WHO, and the World Bank.

He also taught as a clinical professor at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. He taught there from 1992 until he retired in 2009.

Important Roles and Groups

During his career, Jim Chin held many important positions. He was recognized for his work in studying infectious diseases.

• He became an elected member of the American Epidemiological Society (AES) in 1973.
• He was the President of the Conference of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) from 1977 to 1978.
• He was the Chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) from 1982 to 1985.
• He was a member of the Armed Forces Epidemiologic Board (AFEB) for several years.
• He was also a member of the Advisory Council for Public Health Preparedness from 2001 to 2004.

Books and Publications

Jim Chin has also contributed to important books about public health.

• He was an editor for sections on communicable diseases in two editions of Maxcy-Rosenau Public Health and Preventive Medicine.
• He was an associate editor for two editions of the American Public Health Association's (APHA) Control of Communicable Diseases Manual (CCDM).
• He became the editor for the 17th edition (2000) of the APHA's Control of Communicable Diseases Manual. This manual is a very important guide for health experts. Many international specialists help update it. It was often called "Benenson's book" because Abram Salmon Benenson was the editor for so long.
• He wrote his own book called The AIDS Pandemic: The Collision of Epidemiology with Political Correctness, which came out in 2007.

Awards

In 1993, Jim Chin received the John Snow award. This award is given for a lifetime of contributions to public health epidemiology by the APHA Epidemiology Section.