How did lead poisoning become a persistent threat in U.S. cities? Lead paint and slumlords played key roles, but so did postwar housing policies that trapped minorities in crumbling inner cities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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…
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…
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
Professor of medicine and deputy director of the Desmond Tutu HIV Centre at the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine, University of Cape Town