Not one month ago, on October 2, Doug Brugge found himself in an unusual place: a Tanzanian police station.
Brugge, Professor of Public Health and Community Medicine at Tufts Medical School, and a Member of the Tisch College faculty, had traveled to that country’s capital for a conference on the dangers of uranium mining. The caravan that took him and other researchers to a planned mining exploration site was stopped by local police; their Tanzanian guide detained and threatened with arrest. The situation was thankfully resolved without further incident, but nonetheless tense: “We ended up staying at the police station well into the night in order to assure that our guide was released,” says Brugge, who also directs the Tufts Community Research Center.