During her long career at Merck & Co., sales and marketing specialist Pam Polino has helped the pharmaceutical giant launch key products such as Gardasil, the vaccine that prevents the spread of human papillomavirus, or HPV, which is linked to cervical cancer and other forms of the deadly disease.<\/p>\n
But one day in 2013, Polino walked away from her desk at Merck’s large office facility in North Wales, Pa., outside of Philadelphia, packed her suitcase and headed for remote sections of the southern African nation of Zambia, where she worked closely with a non-governmental organization (NGO) called ZCAHRD, for the Zambian Center for Applied Health Research and Development. Over the next three months, she lived with a colleague in a cramped hut with no hot water, driving for hours over rugged terrain to interview pregnant women and their families about Zambia’s current system of bare-bones maternity shelters where rural expectant mothers stay in the days before giving birth.<\/p>\n