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Control of chronic infectious diseases in low resource settings
Hasker, E.C.
Publication date
2010
Link to publication
Citation for published version (APA):
Hasker, E. C. (2010). Control of chronic infectious diseases in low resource settings.
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Curriculum vitae
141
Curriculum vitae
Epco Hasker was born on December 26, 1962 in Tiel, The Netherlands. He studied medicine at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, from which he graduated in 1989. During his
medical studies he spent three months in Karachi, Pakistan, as an intern in a leprosy hospital. This experience had a profound influence on his later career choice.
Immediately upon his graduation as a medical doctor he enrolled in the tropical medicine course at the Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM) in Antwerp, Belgium. He successfully completed the course in March 1990. In the meantime he had been requested to join on a short term contract the LEPCO program, a leprosy control program established in 1984 in Hazarajat, Central Afghanistan, by the management of the leprosy hospital in Karachi. After eight months in a remote area of the central highlands of Afghanistan where he worked as a medical officer in one of the LEPCO clinics, he returned to the Netherlands in December 1990. From January 1991 till April 1993 he worked as medical officer in an asylum seeker center in Rijsbergen, the Netherlands.
In May 1993 he left for Nigeria, together with his wife, Els Duysburgh. In Nigeria he worked for three years and a half as tuberculosis and leprosy control coordinator in Bauchi State on behalf of the Netherlands Leprosy Relief Association. In 1996 he was requested to return to Afghanistan and assume the role of program director of LEPCO, based in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif. He settled in Mazar-i-Sharif in January 1997, together with his wife and one-year old daughter. When in May 1997 Mazar-i-Sharif became a major battleground in the Afghan civil war, they evacuated to Peshawar, Pakistan, from where he continued to manage the LEPCO program until June 2001. During this period he reorganized the tuberculosis control
component of the LEPCO program in accordance with the principles of the DOTS strategy. In September 2001 he enrolled in the Masters of Science (MSc) in Disease Control course at ITM in Antwerp, from which he graduated in August 2002. Upon completion of his MSc he moved to Kiev, Ukraine, where he worked as team leader in an EU funded pilot project on DOTS implementation on behalf of KNCV Tuberculosis Foundation from the Netherlands. Having become familiar with the Soviet system of TB control and having acquired a conversational level of the Russian language, he moved to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in May 2005. In Tashkent he worked for another three years as project manager and regional technical advisor in a tuberculosis control project of an American NGO, Project HOPE. In this period he frequently visited the different regions of Uzbekistan but also the four other
countries of former Soviet Central Asia. In response to requests from counterparts he developed short training courses on epidemiology and operational research and set up a number of studies investigating problems related to tuberculosis control in the region. In July 2008 he and his family moved back to Belgium where he was employed at the disease control unit of the department of public health of ITM as scientific collaborator on neglected tropical diseases. His current responsibilities include teaching in the Masters of Public Health Disease Control course and technical support to counterparts conducting research on visceral leishmaniasis in India and human African trypanosomiasis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
He has very much enjoyed living abroad with his family and being in touch with other cultures. He still enjoys travelling for work and travelling with his family to discover new destinations and experience different cultures.
