Hooked on ID with Paul Adjei, MD, MS, FACP
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Even before I came to the United States to start my internal medicine residency, I had discovered that my calling was a career in infectious diseases.
It took 5 years from medical school graduation to get through all three steps of the United States Medical Licensing Examination while working full time in my home country of Ghana. I served in other capacities during these 5 years, including as a volunteer civilian medical officer with the United Nations peacekeeping missions in Liberia and Ivory Coast. Working with the U.N. in Liberia (2005-2006) and Ivory Coast (2008-2009), during their brutal civil wars, left no doubt in my mind whatsoever that a career in infectious diseases was going to be my future.
I worked in U.N. field clinics/hospitals. In addition to our official mandate of treating U.N. staff (soldiers, civilians, contractors), we provided various services for the internally displaced local population, including but not limited to outpatient medical-surgical care, ambulance service, vaccinations and health education. By far, the most painful memories are those of helplessly watching children and women die from simple preventable infectious diseases such as cholera, dysentery, salmonellosis and malaria. We treated countless rape victims on a daily basis, each of whom tested positive for HIV. The “aha moment” of my call to a career in infectious diseases came with the realization that beyond the immediate impact of bullets and land mines, the health atrocities silently exacted by easily preventable infectious diseases were even more devastating. Whole populations were decimated by simple diseases that have long since disappeared from the vocabulary of the “civilized” world.
Thus far, I have been humbled by the unique privileges and opportunities that a career in infectious diseases has offered me to contribute to society. It has been everything I had hoped for in more ways than one. I have had the privilege as a clinician to not only provide care for patients whose lives depended on it, but also to ensure that desperately needed, lifesaving and delicately transplanted organs survived threatening infections or rejection. But even more importantly, my career as an ID research physician has afforded me the opportunity to contribute to the fight against major existential threats facing humanity: from innovative and groundbreaking research in the race toward ever elusive HIV vaccines and cures, to the prevention of the projected post-antibiotic era, and the rise of the superbugs!
Although I may not have had the privilege of practicing in the developing world settings that raised and motivated me to these heights, my extensive research work with the U.S. Army in Africa and Asia has touched numerous lives across the developing world.
Thanks to a career in ID, I am now part of something bigger than myself, and I look forward to the future with greater hope that I can leave the world a better place.
Paul Adjei, MD, MS, FACP
Major, Medical Corps, U.S. Army
Research physician and assistant chief of clinical trials,
U.S. Military HIV Research Program, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research
Assistant professor of medicine, Uniformed Services of the Health Sciences School of Medicine
Faculty, infectious diseases fellowship and internal medicine residency programs, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center
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