Q&A With Gregg Gonsalves: Global Health Justice Now
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…
Indigenous Responses to Violence against Women
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…
Coinfections: Managing a dynamic network of diseases
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…
Bangladesh: In Practice
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…
Consider the ASHA: A Qualitative Analysis of Accredited Social Health Activists’ Experiences in Udaipur, India
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…
Why International Agreements Won’t Solve the Health Crisis of Palm Oil Deforestation in Indonesia
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…
CRISPR/Cas9 and The Future of Global Health
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…
Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis
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…
Digital Health in the Context of China’s Healthcare System
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.…
Zika as a Catalyst for Reproductive Rights Reform in Latin America
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…
A Legacy of Imperialism: Health Disparities in the Pacific
BY ERICA KOCHER The Pacific Islands, sometimes known as Oceania, include the regions of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. These three regions encompass tens of thousands of islands, each of which has a distinct culture. Although Oceania covers approximately 15% of the Earth’s surface area and is home to millions of Pacific Islanders, the unique issues…
An Examination of the Opioid Crisis: Methods of Mitigating Pain
BY NANCY LU On January 27, 2017, the image of the Florida couple passed out in their car with a 2-year old toddler in the backseat bore deeply into the hearts of parents, people nationwide, and even addicts themselves.1 Here was one image with a clear representation of the havoc that addiction could wreak. The…
A New World Health Organization: The Search for a Director-General
BY MATTHEW PETTUS Dr. Margaret Chan, Hong Kong-Canadian physician and Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), will be leaving her position this June, after a ten-year term. This means that the World Health Assembly must commence the search for a new Director-General, someone who can poignantly address the intersection between policy, global health, and…
Overcoming Challenges to Hospice Care in China
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…
Failure to Fund: The Mexico City Policy’s Impact on Global Health
BY CAROLINE TANGOREN On January 23rd, just two days after the historic Women’s March on Washington demonstrated popular support for women’s rights, President Trump signed an executive order to reinstate the Mexico City Policy, dealing a horrible blow to women’s health globally.1 Broadly speaking, this hot-topic policy prevents any international non-governmental organization (NGO) that provides…
White Male Suicide: The Exception to Privelege
BY LAURA MICHAEL In recent years, both the American government and public have given increasing amounts of attention to mental health issues and awareness on college campuses and among adolescents. While college students and adolescents represent two vulnerable populations in America, they are not necessarily at the highest risk for suicide. Although white men historically…
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