BY MATTHEW PETTUS This past May, leaders of health from across the globe met in Geneva, Switzerland to participate in the 70th World Health Assembly. Serving as the highest level decision-making body in health policy, the World Health Assembly assembles health ambassadors from 194 member states to oversee how the World Health Organization (WHO) is…
BY COLIN HEMEZ When it comes to infectious diseases, the presence of one usually means the presence of many. Differences in environment, socioeconomics, and even genetics all conspire to leave some populations with high burdens of many diseases and other populations with low burdens of few diseases. This inconsistent distribution unfortunately results in many cases…
BY SREEJA KODALI Last summer I had the immense privilege of travelling to Dhaka, Bangladesh to assist in the implementation of a new epidemiological study from Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) at the National Institute of Neuro-Sciences (NINS). The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), investigates the relationship between epidemic arsenic poisoning and…
BY GRACIE JIN 18-year-old Ianka Barbosa cradles her baby daughter, Sophia, in her parents’ tiny brick house in northeast Brazil. She was 7 months pregnant when she learned that Sophia had microcephaly, the incurable condition causing atypically small heads, severe birth defects, and intellectual disability, which doctors blamed on the Zika virus. Before Sophia was…
BY EVALINE XIE Lucius Annaeus Seneca, an ancient Roman statesman and Stoic philosopher once wrote in his essay “On the Shortness of Life” that “it takes the whole of life to learn how to live, and […] the whole of life to learn how to die.”1 As courageously as the Roman Stoics faced death, Seneca…
BY KARINA XIE Gregg Gonsalves (PhD) is a longtime HIV/AIDS activist who started working with ACT UP in 1990 and founded the Treatment Action Group. He now teaches at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale Law School, where he is the Co-Director of the Global Health Justice Partnership. The Yale Global Health Review…
BY EMMA PHELPS Every February 14th, indigenous women call attention to missing and murdered Native American and Alaska Native women. This year, Yale Sisters of All Nations, a group of indigenous women at Yale, held an art exhibition in the Ezra Stiles Art Gallery in collaboration with Yale Native American Arts Coalition. The show commemorated…
BY SARA LOCKE Khushi Baby is a wearable mHealth platform tracking maternal and child health to the last mile. Its mission is to reduce infant and maternal mortality due to vaccine-preventable disease. As explained in the Khushi Baby 2016 Annual Report, the Khushi Baby system comprises of a culturally tailored NFC necklace, which digitally stores…
BY AKIELLY HU Last spring break, I had the opportunity to travel to Indonesia to learn about sustainable palm oil with a group from the Yale International Relations Association. As a naïve freshman, I remember asking the group leaders before we left, “What sorts of activism efforts might we do once we get back on…
BY AKHIL UPNEJA The discovery of CRISPR/Cas9 has revolutionized the field of genetic engineering in countless ways. From targeting genes conferring antibiotic resistance to creating disease models in animals, the technique offers scientists a fast, cheap, and accurate alternative to every other gene-editing system on the market. While its applications in human disease continue to…
BY SARAH SPAULDING Throughout much of known human history and prehistory, tuberculosis (TB) has surged and receded along a time scale that challenges much of the accepted scientific understanding of typical epidemic cycles of infectious diseases. Written records of TB appear in Greek literature dating as far back as 460 BCE, with Hippocrates’ description of…
BY MEGAN LAM China’s “Medical Ruckus” March, 2012: Li Mengnan, 17, walked into the First Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University in Northern China. He carried a four-inch fruit knife. He impaled the first person he encountered in the neck, injured several medical staff, and then unsuccessfully tried to kill himself before fleeing the scene.…
