Treating Global Health At Your Doorstep Starts with a Good Patient History

Ed Zuroweste, MD is the Founding Medical Director for Migrant Clinicians Network. He was present for the first official meeting of Migrant Clinicians Network in 1985 and has been consistently involved with the organization since that time. Dr. Zuroweste began his work with migrants as a partner in a private practice in Chambersburg, PA. He later became the Medical Director of Keystone Health Center, a large Migrant and Community Health Center in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. While attending to his administrative responsibilities, Dr. Zuroweste also maintained a full-time clinical practice in family practice and obstetrics, including full hospital privileges in Pediatrics, Adult Medicine, and Obstetrics. In addition to his work with MCN, Dr. Zuroweste is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine where he directs an International Rural Health Elective in Honduras. Dr. Zuroweste is also the staff physician for seven County Health Department tuberculosis clinics, Pennsylvania Department of Health and he currently acts as the Tuberculosis Medical Consultant for the PA Dept. of Health; a Clinical Consultant for a separate consulting firm. Dr. Zuroweste has worked for the World Health Organization (WHO) on two separate short-term assignments; the first in 2009-2010 as a Special Medical Consultant during the H1N1 influenza pandemic, and in 2014 as a Special Medical Consultant with the Ebola Response Team in Guinea and Sierra Leone, West Africa. Dr. Zuroweste has also participated in three CDC/WHO sponsored screening programs for TB/Leprosy/DM twice in the Marshall Islands (Ebeye 2017 and Majuro 2018) and most recently in the Micronesia on the island of Chuuk in 2023. He has traveled extensively in Central America, especially Honduras and Guatemala both for teaching and pleasure. He has also traveled to Europe, South America, and the Caribbean. Dr. Zuroweste is married with three children. When not working, Dr. Zuroweste enjoys long distance running, listening to great music, great movies, and concerts, working out of doors, and traveling with family and friends to far-off locations. 

As the Chief Medical Officer for Migrant Clinicians Network, Dr. Madaras is responsible for the oversight of MCN clinical activities. He also serves as a subject matter expert for various topics in migrant and immigrant health including COVID-19 clinical education. Since the first weeks of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, Dr. Madaras treated thousands of patients sick enough to need hospitalization and sometimes intensive care.  Over the last 30 years, in parts of Africa, Latin America, South America, the Pacific Islands, and the United States, Dr. Madaras has served thousands for wide ranging ailments, including newly emerging diseases such as Zika and most recently COVID-19. This interest began for him in the mid-1980s while serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Congo where he learned to recognize schistosomiasis, onchocerciasis, filariasis, strongyloidiasis, and other tropical diseases, and witnessed the start of a newly detected virus soon to be named HIV. 

Dr. Madaras spent his early childhood in Hungary and Sweden, arriving in the United States as refugee in 1968 at the age of seven and eventually became a US citizen. He graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in biochemistry in 1983. He served three years in the Peace Corps in Congo (Zaire) as a regional fisheries coordinator, and then as a PC Country Desk Assistant for Ghana/Liberia/Sierra Leone in Washington, DC. He also worked as a pesticide review manager in the EPA in Washington, with several publications in the Federal Register regarding the removal of chemicals harmful to human health. Dr. Madaras received his MD and Masters in Public Health from Tufts University School of Medicine in 1993, and worked in Gabon, West Africa as an Albert Schweitzer Fellow in pediatrics. Later he worked with the American Refugee Committee on the Congo/Rwandan border during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. He also worked on the Hungarian border with the former Yugoslavia in 1995. Since 1996, Dr. Madaras has worked as a board-certified family physician in both inpatient and outpatient medicine in Pediatrics, Adult Medicine and Obstetrics.  He served as a frontline clinician at the Keystone Health Center, a community health center, where he cared for farmworkers and their families and became Assistant Medical Director from 2001 to 2005. In 2005, he became a hospitalist in Chambersburg and Waynesboro Hospitals in south central Pennsylvania, where he continues to work part time. In 2016 he became a Senior Fellow of Hospital Medicine. In 2020, he became a Fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians (FAAFP). 

In addition, Dr. Madaras has worked as a staff physician in Tuberculosis control at the Pennsylvania State Health Department since 2012, and regularly teaches US-based medical students on an international health rotation in Honduras. Dr. Madaras also teaches hospital medicine to Penn State nurse practitioner and physician assistant students and medical residents at Summit Health. He is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Penn State College of Medicine as well as the Medical Director of Educational Affairs at WellSpan Summit Health. Dr. Madaras is married with two grown children. He enjoys language, travel, scuba diving, and hiking. He has been a nationally ranked age-group triathlete and completed several marathons and a dozen 50-mile ultra marathons.