Name:  Dr. Steve Swanson

Age: 39

Home: Minneapolis, MN

Work:  Pediatric Hospitalist and Infectious Disease Consultant at Hennepin County Medical Center which is a teaching hospital associated with the University of Minnesota.

We met Steve at Posada de Santiago Atitlan on Lake Atitlan in Guatemala.  Steve brought his entire family – wife Jodi, daughters Hannah and Indya, and son Caedmon – to Guatemala for a month so that he could study Spanish and become proficient in the language.  He was compelled to do this because of the influx of Latino patients at the Medical Center.  In order to help them, he wanted to be able to personally understand what they were saying and communicate without the use of an interpreter.      

What makes him interesting?:  As the child of missionaries to Asia, Steve grew up in both first and third (developing) world settings.  His exposure to poverty and the cascade of problems stemming from it set him on a lifelong quest to prepare him for making a difference.    

He came to the United States at age 21 where he enrolled in the University of Minnesota and, following graduation, was accepted to Harvard Medical School.  After receiving his MD degree, Steve took an unusual detour for the medical profession.  Rather than pursuing a residency program, he opted to travel to Kenya where he served as a doctor in the pediatric ward of a rural missions hospital.  While there, he grew particularly interested in pediatric infectious diseases and public health.  The majority of child deaths in the developing world continue to be attributable to malnutrition and infection.

When he returned to the United States, he dedicated the next sixteen years to his ultimate practice.  He initially trained in Pediatrics at Children’s Hospital in Oakland, California. His interest in third-world health issues then led him to Peru, where he studied Tropical Medicine and Parasitology, followed by post-doctoral fellowship training in Pediatric Infectious Diseases at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.  He later completed a two-year field epidemiology fellowship as an Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) officer with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Important event in his life:  Perhaps it was the echo from his youth in Asia, but Steve was always drawn overseas to work.  He felt reinvigorated every time.  In 1994, he spent the entire summer in Rwanda where he witnessed the horrible and all-pervasive effects of genocide.  Along with treating hundreds of children who no longer had any relatives, he observed what happens when an entire infrastructure is decimated. The lack of a public health structure unleashed the deadly dysentery caused by cholera and shigella.  The killing was rampant and rapid.  It broke his heart to know that building the simplest latrine and waters systems would have cut the refugee camp death rate by 80%.       

Continuing to make a difference: Making a sufficient living while working internationally proved to be quite a challenge for Steve once he was married and started raising a family.  He chose to return to Minnesota and take the position at Hennepin County Medical Center.  Since it was a teaching hospital, this gave him the opportunity to teach other doctors.  And ironically, it was a facility that gave him access to a population much in need of his expertise – immigrants. 

Minnesota has a history of progressive and welcoming policies toward immigrants and refugees.  In the late 70’s and early 80’s, there was an influx of Hmong from Laos, a tribal group that befriended the U.S. during the Viet Nam war.  At the time, they accounted for the largest ethnicity in Minnesota outside of Caucasian.

In the mid-90’s refugees from Sub-Saharan Africa (Somalis, Liberians, Sudanese and Ethiopians) flocked to the state, occasionally bringing with them various tropical diseases, including malaria, acquired in Africa. 

The most recent wave of immigrants is changing the demographics yet again.  The Latino population is swelling and its presence in the hospital created the impetus for Steve to travel to Guatemala to learn the language.  He felt in order to properly treat them, he must be able to communicate.    

Philosophy of Life:  Life and its calling are larger than ourselves and the immediate family.  We are given skills and talents with a responsibility to use them for others. 

We should raise our children to not only be citizens of the country but citizens of the world.  We should teach them to respect and enjoy people as they are.

“Personally, I want to improve the health of children in developing countries.  I want to train others in order to magnify what I do.”