{"id":19021,"date":"2022-11-21T16:49:06","date_gmt":"2022-11-21T16:49:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/160-news\/?p=19021"},"modified":"2026-02-27T22:55:06","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T22:55:06","slug":"forecasting-a-better-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/2022\/11\/forecasting-a-better-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Forecasting a Better Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Daniel P. Smith \/ Photo by Adam Glanzman<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In March 2020, weeks before COVID-19 would overtake the nation, Omar Mansour \u201916 visited Cabell County, West Virginia, to confront another public health crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 288-square-mile county on the West Virginia\u2013Ohio border told a gripping story of the despair the opioid epidemic had unleashed upon American communities, as well as the resilience and demands for justice many residents were leveraging to reverse the devastating trend. Mansour was there to help local leaders determine the cost of interventions to rebuild community health\u2014as well as the cost of not taking action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Cabell County, an estimated 81 million opioid painkillers had flooded the not-quite-100,000-resident county over an eight-year period, according to court documents. At least 10 percent of Cabell County\u2019s population, including one in ten newborns, are affected by opioid use disorder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to the eye-opening numbers, Mansour recalls the tale of young siblings orphaned twice in twenty-four hours. A day after the children\u2019s parents died from a fatal overdose of opioids laced with fentanyl, their grandparents\u2014and newly entrusted caregivers\u2014overdosed on the same tainted batch of drugs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou see the devastation firsthand and hear stories like that, and it\u2019s hard to look away,\u201d Mansour says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mansour\u2019s work with Johns Hopkins University epidemiologist Caleb Alexander, MD, however, has enabled some communities to begin healing. His experiences in the field fueled the former Macalester biology major to double down on efforts to improve human health.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finding his niche<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Born and raised in Jordan, Mansour attended high school in the Netherlands, where he encountered Mac students studying abroad. Listening to their stories of Mac\u2019s liberal arts focus and the international student body, Mansour ditched thoughts of attending college in the U.K. to enroll at Mac.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although Mansour arrived in St. Paul considering pre-med, his work with two Community and Global Health professors\u2014Christy Hanson and Vittorio Addona\u2014transformed his focus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hanson\u2019s International Public Health class sparked Mansour\u2019s interest in advancing human wellness through policy. As a sophomore, Mansour worked alongside Hanson on a project for Kenya\u2019s Ministry of Health. The two identified risk factors for treatment interruption among patients with tuberculosis in the East African country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, Addona, a statistician who studies the medical applications of statistics, spurred Mansour\u2019s enthusiasm for epidemiology, a field marrying population health with mathematical concepts. Addona taught Mansour in four courses and supervised his research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOmar possesses a rare combination of intelligence, discipline, perseverance, and a desire to do meaningful research,\u201d Addona says. \u201cHe was always capable of identifying what tasks needed to get done to move a project forward, and then completed those tasks with diligence and thoroughness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following his undergraduate studies in biology and statistics, Mansour earned a master\u2019s degree in epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University, regarded by many as one of the nation\u2019s premier schools of public health. One of his Johns Hopkins professors was Alexander, who serves as an expert witness and advisor on opioid litigation. A month before graduation, Alexander invited Mansour to join his fledgling effort advising local governments on opioid litigation. Mansour accepted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI had no idea what it would become,\u201d he admits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Projects with a purpose<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Over the next three years, Mansour crisscrossed the country, from West Virginia to California, studying the far-reaching impacts of the opioid epidemic. He toured towns with staff from local family services agencies, counselors, law enforcement officials, teachers, and municipal leaders. Every visit left Mansour with a heightened sense of purpose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alexander designed customized abatement programs for each community, such as treatment centers, public education, and increased access to Naloxone, the medicine used to reverse opioid overdoses. A health economist calculated the cost of Alexander\u2019s prescribed interventions, a figure local governments would later use in court cases when seeking abatement from manufacturers, distributors, pharmacies, and others charged with driving the opioid crisis. Meanwhile, Mansour completed the underlying modeling and statistics for Alexander\u2019s plans. Specifically, he forecast the burden of the epidemic in public health terms with or without certain interventions over the next fifteen years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mansour\u2019s work made the complex digestible. It provided political leaders, judges, and the general public straightforward and accessible information to explain the extent of the problem and the value of potential solutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf you fail to make a clear and compelling argument, then you\u2019re not going to get support,\u201d Mansour says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alexander\u2019s team continues advising local governments in about twenty cases collectively seeking some $100 billion in abatement. Its work contributed to the $12 billion settlement in 2019 between roughly 2,000 local governments and Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin. Any awards from these lawsuits fund many of the much-needed interventions Alexander designed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHaving seen the devastating effects of the opioid crisis firsthand, I\u2019m honored and humbled I was able to use my skills to help here,\u201d Mansour says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last year, Mansour left Alexander\u2019s team to pursue a PhD at Harvard University in pharmacoepidemiology, a field devoted to evaluating the effects of pharmaceutical use in large populations. He plans to focus his research on the effectiveness of various cancer-treatment strategies. Mansour predicts that increased access to health data, technological developments like artificial intelligence, and a promising pipeline of oncology drugs will dramatically change cancer treatment over the next two decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI want to be a part of that change,\u201d Mansour says. \u201cI want to keep doing my part to help people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Daniel P. Smith is a Chicago-based freelance writer. <\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Epidemiologist Omar Mansour \u201916 helped communities hold Big Pharma accountable for the opioid crisis. <\/p>","protected":false},"author":1077,"featured_media":19048,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","mediatype-articles"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"fields":{"article_type":[8],"flickr_photoset_id":"","youtube_id":"","square_thumbnail":false,"press_photos":false,"story_title":"","story_caption":"","rotations":false,"maps":false,"marker_title":"","marker_text":"","geographic_location":false,"feature_embed":"","custom_link_url":"","news_icon_name":"","image_options":false,"main_feature_story":"","custom_image":false,"custom_feature_title":"","custom_feature_caption":"","custom_markup":"","custom_markup_link":"","custom_markup_title":"","custom_markup_caption":"","byline":"","post_thumbnail_style":"default","press_downloads":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1077"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19021"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19021\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30911,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19021\/revisions\/30911"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}