Insecticides and mosquito nets only get you so far. Synthetic biologists are ready to take the battle against mosquito-borne disease to the level of DNA – which might spell the insects’ ultimate doom.
Treating municipal water, particularly from rivers, is difficult technically and cash-strapped municipalities like Flint don’t always know the latest science.
The University of Michigan-Flint puts experts from academia in the same room as Flint community members, an innovative model for educating the community and forming the public health response.
Flint, Michigan residents couldn’t get answers about their water – so they did their own research.
Laura Nawrocik
A new model of citizen-led science is emerging – as in the case of Flint, Michigan’s poisoned water. Rather than simply supporting scientists, citizens ask their own questions and set the research agenda.
Up until the 1940s, as much as half of U.S. water piping from main lines was made of lead.
Thomashawk/flickr
Chris Sellers, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York)
A wake-up call from Flint: the U.S. has made great gains in reducing lead exposure, but the country is still saddled with millions of miles of water-carrying lead pipes.
Public health isn’t a standard part of medical school curricula.
Medical school class images via www.shutterstock.com.
Contraception gives women the choice of how many children to have and when to have them. This empowers them - but millions of women in Kenya do not have this choice.
Doctors and patients are aware of the problem – they just don’t see themselves as responsible for it.
www.shutterstock.com
As smoking continues its inexorable southward journey toward single-digit percentages of populations being smokers, it’s common to hear people say the smokers who remain are all “hard core”, heavily dependent…
Over the 23 days, we saw just 20 people vaping: 15 in Paris, one in Lyon, one in Calvi, one in Barcelona and two in Madrid.
www.ecigclick.co.uk /Flickr
Every traveller forms impressions about patterns of frequently or seldom seen cultural differences when visiting other countries. You see far fewer women than men on the streets of more conservative Islamic…
Health technology such as apps is changing doctor and patient interaction for the better.
Intel Free Pass/flickr
New tests and drugs have always impacted health care. But completely different kinds of emerging technologies will soon radically alter how health care is both accessed and delivered.
Imagine you were about to buy a property and were advised that in two years time, a major freeway would be built two hundred metres away, greatly diminishing the value of your purchase. Then imagine you…
Increasing human-wildlife interactions pose threats not only to public health, but also to conservation, and well-being.
Ahmed Khan
Dean Faculty of Health Sciences and Professor of Vaccinology at University of the Witwatersrand; and Director of the SAMRC Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Analytics Research Unit, University of the Witwatersrand
Principal Medical Scientist and Head of Laboratory for Antimalarial Resistance Monitoring and Malaria Operational Research, National Institute for Communicable Diseases
Professor and Programme Director, SA MRC Centre for Health Economics and Decision Science - PRICELESS SA (Priority Cost Effective Lessons in Systems Strengthening South Africa), University of the Witwatersrand