Alvin T. Onaka, Ph.D., Earns National Recognition

Alvin T. Onaka, Ph.D. State Registrar and Chief of the Office of Health Status Monitoring of the Hawaii Department of Health was recently elected President of the National Association for Public Health Statistics and Information Systems (NAPHSIS) at their 69th Annual Meeting in Anchorage, Alaska.

Onaka is the first NAPHSIS president elected from the State of Hawaii in the 69-year history of the organization. The Association was founded in 1933 and represents health and vital statistics officials from the 50 states, the District of Columbia, New York City and the U.S. Territories. Their national headquarters is in Washington, D.C.

NAPHSIS under Onaka’s leadership is planning to celebrate its 70^th anniversary with a meeting in New York City in 2003 focusing on International Cooperation in Health and Vital Statistics. Building on last year’s theme of "9/11: Vital and Health Statistics Lessons Learned," Onaka will be working with Canada, Mexico, the United Nations and the U.S. Government to re-engineer the national and international vital and health statistics systems to be prepared against threats of international terrorism, identity fraud, and the electronic registration of birth and death vital events.

Involvement in international activities is not new for Onaka. Before returning home in 1981 he worked for the U.S. National Academy of Sciences as a Research Associate in the Department of Epidemiology and Statistics at the Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Hiroshima, Japan for two years. Between 1974 and 1978 he worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Washington, D.C. from where he traveled to over 60 countries working on population and health projects mostly in the less developed countries of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia.

Onaka is a graduate of Iolani School and received a doctoral degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst as a Population Council Fellow in Demography. He has done postgraduate work in Epidemiology at the University of Minnesota. Nationally, he is an adviser to the National Death Index and chaired the U.S. Standard Death Certificate Revision Committee for the National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Locally, he has been on the affiliate graduate faculty of the Population Studies Program at the University of Hawaii at Manoa since 1982. He also serves on the Health Science Advisory Committee of the Hawaii Chapter of the American Cancer Society.

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