In my last post, I profiled the Origins of AIDS, Jacques Pépin's masterful study of how the virus that causes AIDS in humans originated in chimps and then jumped to humans and later took off as a result of a complex series of events involving local populations...
What can we learn from histories of the AIDS crisis? Jacques Pépin's The Origins of AIDS and Nathan Geffen's Debunking Delusions: The Inside Story of the Treatment Action Campaign are two important...
Three weeks ago, Hillary Clinton gave a speech at the National Institutes of Health suggesting that because of recent advances in scientific understanding we could finally envision an AIDS-free...
Yesterday the ICRC released a report on the very scary and depressing trend of attacks on medical workers in situations of armed conflict and civil disturbances:According to Dr Robin Coupland, who...
The more I think about it, the more atrocious it is that a three year old burn victim in Pakistan or Libya cannot automatically access morphine. Imagine being such a child's parent, watching her suffer without pain relief. Imagine being a “collateral damage” victim undergoing surgery for shrapnel removal without anesthetic. Or imagine being an earthquake survivor like the Haitian 10-year-old above, having your mangled limb amputated and then trying to recover with no means to manage your pain.Recently I spent some time talking to Jason Nickerson, a PhD candidate in population health at the...
I have been fortunate to be a part of a number of interesting conversations over the last few weeks, and am currently attending the conference linked above, hosted by the Levan Institute for Humanities and Ethics, the University of Southern California Global Health Institute, and the Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California. Conversations are centering around global norms and international agreements on women's health, health aid, human trafficking, economic empowerment, violence and war, and medicine distribution. These conversations are extremely...
When I make the connection between health and national security in my classes, we usually talk about pandemics or bio-warfare. But check this out: a new study from the Army Times tells us that unhealthy diets also drastically reduce America's military readiness. Turns out 35% of young Americans between the ages of 18-24 are unfit to serve in the military because they're too fat, up from 6% 20 years ago. Noah Schactman has more. Is this any surprise, really? Perhaps the US government should declare a global war on cholesterol in the name of national security. Only instead of using unmanned...
World leaders who recently met with him are being notified.