Dr. Mona Donates $60K in Prize Money to Flint Water Recovery

Because of course she did. She's Dr. Mona!

Hurley pediatrician and Flint superstar Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha has won yet another award for her work in exposing the Flint water crisis - the 2020 Fries Prize for Improving Public Health. And it comes with a $60,000 cash prize, which she's already donated.

The Fries Prize, according to Dr. Mona in an email to MLive, was created to be something like the "Nobel peace prize in health." It "recognizes an individual who has made major accomplishments in health improvement, with emphasis on recent contributions to health in the United States, and with the general criteria of the greatest good for the greatest number."

The award was created by Dr. James F. Fries, who was a professor of medicine at Stanford University. He was hiking up to the summit of Nepal’s Mount Makalu in the 1980s when his party became trapped in a severe snowstorm. Afterwards, Dr. Fries set out to establish "a foundation to support a Nobel-like prize for health that now annually awards a $60,000 prize to an individual judged by an expert panel to have done the greatest good for the greatest number in the field of health."

By the time she was interviewed about this, she had already donated the cash prize to the Pediatric Public Health Initiative, which is a longterm recovery effort to train the next generation of pediatricians.

And, of course, this isn't the first time she's donated prize money - after she won the Vilcek-Gold Award for Humanism in Healthcare and The Arnold P. Gold Foundation of Englewood Cliffs in 2019, she donated the $10,000 cash prize to the Flint Kids nonprofit organization.