Today the "Your Health" staff at the Post-Gazette spotlights people across the Pittsburgh region who are doing things to improve the way we live, locally and globally.

Their contributions are made in a wide variety of areas, from aiding the poor and medically fragile children to pointing the way to a "greener" Pittsburgh.

Here are a dozen people who made this region a better place to live in 2003. Click on the portraits by PG staff photographer Annie O'Neill to go to the stories:

Dr. Henri Ford and Dr. Ed Barksdale

Coming to the aid of poor and medically fragile children here and abroad

	Annie O'Neill/Post-Gazette

Drs. Henri Ford and Ed Barksdale, both 45, are surgeons at Children's Hospital who are developing projects to better the lives of people in their communities.

They also have been friends since 1976, when they met as 17-year-olds at a college preparatory course at Columbia University's Barnard College. Their relationship deepened while they attended Harvard Medical School, from which they graduated in 1984.

"We have an insatiable thirst for excellence, to be the very best at what we do," said Ford. "We demand excellence of everyone around us and we expect it from each other."

-- By Anita Srikameswaran

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Kathy McKain, Lori Albright and Nancy Niemczyk

Nurse midwives whose dedication kept a special birthing center operating

	Annie O'Neill/Post-Gazette

Ask anyone involved who is most responsible for preserving the Midwife Center for Birth and Women's Health as the region's only fully licensed, free-standing birth center, and the whole team of moms-turned-volunteers, clients-turned administrators and medical staff-turned savvy business people will get credit.

But if any deserves a special mention, it's Lori Albright, Nancy Niemczyk and Kathy McKain. The three certified nurse midwives sacrificed time and paychecks to keep alive an operation that strives to empower women in birth and beyond.

The result of their efforts is a homey new center in the Strip District.

-- By Virginia Linn

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Dr. Robert Arnold

Teaching doctors to talk, and listen, to patients

	Annie O'Neill/Post-Gazette

Nobody likes to give bad news, least of all a physician whose patient is dying.

Dr. Robert M. Arnold nevertheless considers it a privilege.

"I went into medicine because I like people, and I want to help them," he explained. At the end of life, a patient's needs -- and the needs of family members -- are profound and it is then that a doctor's help can be especially important.

It's not that he doesn't feel sadness when his patients are sad. But he appreciates the richness of the human spirit.

"I'm privileged. People allow me into their lives to try to help them -- and I see families come together and help each other in ways that are amazing."

-- By Byron Spice

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Dr. Chris Conti

Physician, soldier and mentor

	Annie O'Neill/Post-Gazette

When it comes to service, emergency room physician Chris Conti is a soldier.

Armed with faith, he aids his country and his community with warmth and conviction.

Last year, Conti, 35, of Monroeville, spent five months in Kandahar, Afghanistan. A member of an air-medical reserve unit, he reported to duty at Andrews Air Force Base one Saturday in March 2002.

By the following Monday, he was in the desert, in the battle zone.

While there, Conti worked for the Critical Air Transport Team, which would treat soldiers maimed in combat.

For 2 1/2 years, Conti has worked in the emergency room at Mercy Hospital in Uptown and at Mercy Providence on the North Side. Nothing in his work here prepared him for extensive shrapnel wounds, land-mine injuries and penetrating traumas that he saw in Afghanistan.

"It was surreal," said Conti, who still can't watch war movies, which used to be a favorite pastime.

-- By Ervin Dyer

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Jerry Livingston and Jerry Bortman

Advocates for prostate cancer education and awareness

	Annie O'Neill/Post-Gazette

This is a story about two Jerrys who live 15 minutes apart in Peters.

Each hit with prostate cancer, they were working independently on grass roots efforts to spread awareness about the disease when they met earlier this year at a cancer support group meeting.

They realized that their projects could dovetail in an organized campaign to fight the disease that killed nearly 29,000 American men this year.

Jerry Livingston, in his 50s, organized the first Father's Day 5K this past summer in front of PNC Park that drew 500 people and netted $20,000. Because a Pittsburgh Pirates game is scheduled on Father's Day 2004, he's hoping to create an all-day affair, as well as to add a 10K to draw more participants.

The point of the 5K is to raise money for greater awareness, education and early detection, and that's where the other Jerry comes in.

Jerry Bortman, 67, regional coordinator for Us Too! International, worked with hospitals and physician groups to expand free screenings during Prostate Cancer Awareness Month in September.

-- By Virginia Linn

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Ann Jones Gerace

Pointing the way to a greener Pittsburgh

	Annie O'Neill/Post-Gazette

Ann Jones Gerace, executive director of Conservation Consultants Inc., has a small office in the three story, energy-efficient CCI Center on South 14th Street on the South Side, that puts her very much in the center of the region's environmental movement.

It is a fluorescent-lit alcove with Oriental rugs on the recycled, citrus-finished hardwood floor. The incandescent Gerace fills it with nurturing warmth for incubating environmental groups that share the building's space and solid direction for CCI.

-- By Don Hopey

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Dr. Richard Shannon

Working toward better control of hospital infections

	Annie O'Neill/Post-Gazette

When Allegheny General Hospital found itself under public scrutiny from a bacterial outbreak that killed a patient, the institution had the choice of clamming up reflexively or volunteering information on what problems had occurred.

To Dr. Richard Shannon, the hospital's chief of medicine since 1997, that was no choice at all. He won praise for the hospital's forthright handling of an investigation and public attention in the months after the October 2002 spread of Pseudomonas bacteria to 16 patients, one of whom died.

Shannon, 48, a cardiologist who was a longtime faculty member at Harvard Medical School before coming to Pittsburgh, believes his profession is too often its own worst enemy for tolerating or covering up errors.

-- By Gary Rotstein

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Dr. Safdar Chaudhary

Working to prevent teen substance abuse in his community

	Annie O'Neill/Post-Gazette

When Dr. Safdar Chaudhary was working as a psychiatrist at the former St. Francis Medical Center, he treated patients for drug and alcohol abuse. Often school counselors would call about a student with a problem, and medical teams were there to help.

But when managed care emerged, those services gradually evaporated, including programs designed to prevent substance abuse.

And federal funds for drug programs have shrunk from 11 percent of the national budget more than a decade ago to 4 percent.

"We know if we don't do preventive care, the problem is not going to go away," he says.

-- By Virginia Linn

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