DARLENE BHAVNANI, PH.D.
A former field epidemiologist is bringing global expertise to bear on one deceptively simple question: Why do certain communities bear the brunt of infectious diseases — especially those that are preventable or treatable — more than others?
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the mortality rate in Austin was less than half of national and statewide averages.
But Darlene Bhavnani, Ph.D., serving as the chief epidemiologist for the University’s COVID-19 contact tracing effort and member of the UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium noticed a pattern emerge: Black and Latina/o/x populations were far more prone to exposure, infection and hospitalization than white populations.
“There’s no evidence to support that genetic factors cause Black and Latina/o/x populations to be more vulnerable to respiratory infections,” says Bhavnani, an assistant professor in Dell Med’s Department of Population Health. “It is the same pattern we see in asthma and other respiratory illnesses, which send children of color to the hospital at twice the rate of their white counterparts here in Travis County. We need to know why.”
Bhavnani was once an applied epidemiologist training with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and working with other nonprofit and academic groups. Her experiences targeting public health crises around the world — diarrheal disease in Ecuador, malaria in Haiti and antibiotic resistance in Thailand, among others — informed not only her understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic but now her approach as an academic investigator in Central Texas.
From Global to Hyperlocal, Filling Knowledge Gaps
In 2022, Bhavnani was awarded a Mentored Research Career Development (K12) grant for junior faculty researchers, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. Mentored by Dell Med faculty members Elizabeth Matsui, M.D., and Paul Rathouz, Ph.D., her current focus is studying the context of children’s environments, in neighborhoods that range from low to high income across Travis County, to understand what about those environments is contributing to the outsize impact on children from communities of color.
In March 2023, Bhavnani and her team’s initial findings on the impact of respiratory virus on Black and Latina/o/x children was promoted as an Editor’s Choice paper in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
“People have done hospital-based studies on this type of disparity, but telling me that a Black child is more likely than a white child to go to the hospital for a respiratory viral infection doesn't tell me if it's more severe in a Black child or if the Black child is more likely to get infected in the first place. Ultimately, we need to better understand the disparities and the social and environmental factors,” says Bhavnani. “I think this is a huge gap in the literature. The novel question we’re asking is not just about viral infection itself but whether those differences in risk of viral infection drive the differences we see in asthma exacerbations.
“Often, people who study asthma are allergists or immunologists, but thinking about this from the perspective of infectious disease epidemiology could help to uncover new paths forward to actionable interventions that meaningfully reduce these disparities.”