BY SOPHIA DE OLIVERA As I peered outside the window of a bus shuttling me to my grandmother’s house from the Rio International Airport, I found myself exceedingly curious about the towering multicolored slums decorating the outskirts of the Brazilian city. These vast stretches of impoverished housing, known as Favelas, were unlike anything I’d ever … Continue reading The Rise of an Unlikely Public Health Ally: Brazilian Drug Cartels
BY ANN-MARIE ABUNYEWA The public health research consensus is that predominantly social and economic factors contribute to the health disparities observed in the United States. The determinants that contribute the least to health disparities are biology and genetics, which is understandable, as all humans share roughly 99.9% of DNA, and modern access to quality healthcare … Continue reading Why is Our Genome Data So White? A Discussion on the Lack of Representation in Genome-Wide Association Studies
BY AMMA OTCHERE Faced with the looming coronavirus threat, governments around the globe have employed a number of strategies to curb the spread of COVID-19. As prisons have emerged as a hotbed for coronavirus, one of the strategies has included attempts to reduce prison populations through methods such as early release and reduced admissions.1 By … Continue reading Mass Incarceration & COVID-19
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 … Continue reading 70th World Health Assembly Recap
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 … Continue reading Coinfections: Managing a dynamic network of diseases
BY SREEJA KODALI Welcoming decorations at a Ramadan celebration in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Source: 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 … Continue reading Bangladesh: In Practice
BY GRACIE JIN A mother holding her baby with microcephaly. Source: Wikimedia Commons. 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, … Continue reading Zika as a Catalyst for Reproductive Rights Reform in Latin America
BY EVALINE XIE A large hospital in Xuzhou, one of the largest cities in China's Jiangsu Province. According to a study in 2012 by researchers at Xuzhou Medical College, only 18.4% of community hospitals in Xuzhou had hospice care services offered. Source: Peter Griffin. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, an ancient Roman statesman and Stoic philosopher once … Continue reading Overcoming Challenges to Hospice Care in China
BY CAROLINE TANGOREN Source: Wikimedia Commons. 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 … Continue reading Failure to Fund: The Mexico City Policy’s Impact on Global Health
Yale Global Health Review 