Manuel Carballo

Dr. Manuel Carballo, is an epidemiologist and is currently the Executive Director of the International Center for Migration and Health (ICMH), and Professor of Public Clinical Health at Columbia University, Mailman School of Public Health in New York.

He previously worked with WHO in several countries. In the 1980s she was responsible for directing for the WHO an international collaborative study on breastfeeding and the impact of breast-milk substitutes on the health of infants and mothers; then it organized the International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes that today guides the infant feeding of the paper industry in this area of health. In 1986 he was one of three people on the team chosen to establish the WHO Global AIDS Programme (GPA) and remained with PAM until 1992 as Head of Behavioural Research. At WHO and WFP, he was also responsible for helping 18 countries in Africa to establish their national AIDS committees and develop their national plans. In 1993 he went to Bosnia as Public Health Advisor for the WHO and remained based in Sarajevo until the end of the war in 1995 as responsible for the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina. On his return from Bosnia, he joined the International Centre for Migration and Health, a Swiss-based research and training organization, and worked again in Bosnia. He later went to Albania and Macedonia for the United Nations to assess the health situation of refugees fleeing Kosovo. In 2001 he was appointed Executive Director of the ICMH. In 2002 and 2003 he headed two health assessment missions for the United Nations in the occupied Palestinian territories, and later in 2003 he moved to Iraq to do the same. In 2004, he led the Tsunami Fund’s relief and reconstruction mission in the Maldives and Sri Lanka. In 2005 and 2006 he spent stints in Iran and Afghanistan developing emergency preparedness plans for those countries.