1994 International Travel Fellowship
Manuel Morejon Campa will receive the 16th annual award, sponsored by Becton Dickinson Vacutainer Systems, Becton Dickinson and Co.
As a young man, Campa attended college at night while working full time at several different animal research institutions. He participated in cattle-raising studies and trials of swine metabolism, and worked as an analyst for a nutrition department. He graduated in biochemistry from the Faculty of Biology of the University of Havana, Cuba, in 1979. For the next 2 years he studied the polluting effects of the liquid wastes of crude sugar mills. He then moved to the hematology department of the clinical laboratory of San Miguel del Padrón Pediatric Hospital in 1981.
Besides working routinely on standardizing analytical procedures for screening some of the common hemoglobinopathies in the Cuban population, Campa started giving courses on quality control and International System (SI) units to technicians and professionals at his own hospital and at neighboring primary care clinical laboratories. In 1985, he started applying an external quality-control scheme to primary care clinical laboratories in the area, which was extended on an experimental basis to the whole province of Ciudad de la Habana a year later. For this work and for his efforts on quality assurance in clinical laboratories, Campa was awarded the Forjadores del Futuro national medal in 1985 and 1986.
In 1988, Campa was promoted to the Board of Standardization, Metrology and Quality Control of the Ministry of Public Health, and was put in charge of introducing SI units in clinical laboratories in the whole country. In 1989 he was asked to develop and establish the first National External Quality Assessment Program for primary care clinical laboratories in Cuba; he has been coordinator of this project, involving more than 600 laboratories, since then. This pioneering work led to his being asked to develop and establish a National System for the Assessment and Registration of In Vitro Diagnostics. This marked the beginning of his work at the National Center for Drug Quality Control, where he is now in charge of the In Vitro Diagnostics Assessment and Registration Division.
Campa is a member of the Cuban Society of Clinical Pathology and has been on its Directive Board since 1989. He was recently appointed the national representative of the International Federation of Clinical Chemistry.