MUSC medical student combats education, pediatric health issues in rural India

By Janie Thomas

Vasanthan Kuppuswamy had already caught the vision as early as the sixth grade. He was teaching English in rural villages as a way to connect with and help his homeland. He worked in the village where his father grew up, and many of his relatives still reside in those hills. After his initial summer visit teaching English, he decided to make this a yearly trip, and since then, has traveled to the Tamil Nadu district of Chennai, India around twenty-five times.

Now, at age 24, he is a first-year medical student at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) and Global Health Trainee Travel grant recipient. His childhood passion for his people in a rural village in Chennai turned into an organization that he is now the founder and CEO of, fostering his continued passion for bringing healthcare and services to the people of India.

A mission to make medicine and public service a top priority was borne out of his involvement abroad. He taught English and founded the Tamil Nadu India School Fund (TNISF) in 2005, which has raised $100,000 to put into the schools in the Tamil Nadu region. Through his work with TNISF, he developed a relationship with Athi Narayan, MD, a practicing neonatologist in Atlanta with more than 40 years of experience in the field—Narayan quickly joined Kuppuswamy in his efforts to impact the public health of this Indian community.

Kuppuswamy is concerned for infants in the region of Tamil Nadu. The current healthcare system does not support vaccines for infants, so Kuppuswamy has hired four nurses to go into the homes of infants in the region. The nurses distribute the vaccines house by house. In the project Kuppuswamy and his associates are conducting, they are sending four nurses into 20-25 villages to see around 300 infants every month. This summer, Kuppuswamy is returning to evaluate the efficacy of this ongoing program by following 30 infants currently enrolled in the program. They are hoping to find evidence that their program is creating a difference in the health and wellness of the infants of Chennai and to do that they are looking at four variables: breastfeeding rates, immunizations, the incidence of acute hospitalizations, and percentage of stunted and underweight infants. With the information they collect, they hope to discover methods of vaccine distribution that they can share with other regions in India and low and middle-income countries’ healthcare systems.

The primary care system in India is much different than the primary care system in the United States. In India, people hardly ever visit the doctor for routine check-ups. Nurses travel to individual homes to give vaccines to children, but no one is completing thorough evaluations of each child. Many times children end up at the doctor with preventable illnesses that could have been caught early by regular checkups. In the United States, the vaccine schedule is linked with wellness check-ups, and the system is efficient in keeping up with the child’s health. “This is why we are starting this program, to reemphasize the importance of wellness checks,” said Kuppuswamy.

They plan to build the program so that the point of care will eventually lie in a healthcare facility instead of nurses traveling from house to house. There are plans to build a small government hospital for the catchment area once funding is secured and space is made available. Kuppuswamy and his team believe that it is best for nurses to continue providing community-based interventions in reaching out to children in rural India. Administering vaccines is vitally important in enhancing health for millions of Indian children. All things being equal, India is doing a phenomenal service to not only its residents but to global health in promoting public health initiatives to marginalized populations and quelling emerging diseases.

Vasanthan is excited about his country’s progress and his own ability to provide a healthcare visitation program for this corner of India. There is extensive evidence that these home health programs are successful in preventing childhood diseases. Vasanthan and his colleagues have unique aspects of their program and a novel approach in reaching children through direct home health visits. “To our knowledge, this method hasn’t been evaluated in a rural setting, so we think our study is unique, has a niche,” said Kuppuswamy, “and we can certainly apply it to other areas as well.” Balancing his global work and medical school is not easy, but Kuppuswamy is not new to the time war that exists between his two priorities: school and serving communities through TNISF. He still keeps up with the necessary maintenance of the organization and farms other necessary tasks out to team members. His main responsibility with TNISF during the school year is fundraising and coordinating the expertise in the United States with what they have going on in India. He and his team recently secured a $6,000 grant from the Academy of Pediatrics, which will be disbursed in $2,000 quantities each year. This will support most of the work of TNISF for the next three years.

Kuppuswamy is committed to bettering the life expectancy of infants in his family’s hometown and is building a better tomorrow for many children, one home visit at a time.

Janie Thomas is an intern in the MUSC Center for Global Health

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