Before you read this, take a moment to Google “lifestyle and health.” If you do, you will be confronted by over a half-billion results. That figure is mind-boggling—but it’s not surprising when you consider how central the notion of “lifestyle” is to our conception of health. From diet books to fitness programs to government initiatives like the First Lady’s “Let’s Move!” campaign, our society is strongly invested in the belief that you can safeguard your wellbeing—if only you take personal responsibility for it.
Equity, Almost: Justice, Gender and the Health of Populations | HuffPost
As we contemplate a potential Hillary Clinton presidency, it would be easy to think that we live in a new era of equality between the sexes. How, after all, could one woman be on the verge of cracking what she once called the “highest and hardest glass ceiling” if things were otherwise? How could we see women operating at the top levels of the corporate and political world if real progress had not been made? Here in in the U.S., after all, we’ve seen women serving as frontline soldiers, running Harvard University, and sitting on the Supreme Court.
Zika virus is not Ebola | The Boston Globe
Just last week, the World Health Organization last week announced that the Zika virus was “spreading explosively.” Today, it declared Zika “a public health emergency of international concern.” The political pressures on the WHO to take this action have been strong. The shadow of Ebola also looms large, and the WHO seems, perhaps understandably, motivated by the worldwide conclusion that it was ineffective in responding to the Ebola epidemic in 2014, waiting to designate that disease as an “emergency” until it was far too late for this designation to matter. It did not want to make this mistake again. The problem is that Zika is not Ebola, or anything like Ebola, and declaring Zika an emergency will simply stoke fear, and even panic, in a public that deserves to have public health decisions made on the basis of facts and science, rather than on politics and fear.
Lessons from Flint: It's Not Just the Water System That's Broken | HuffPost
The flip of a switch in April 2014 that led to the massive water contamination in Flint, Michigan, is now a public health crisis that will take years and millions of dollars to remedy. The immediate challenge is to replace the corroded pipes that are carrying contaminated water as soon as possible, and to ensure that the city of nearly 100,000 has access to clean water.
Roe v. Wade Anniversary Reminds Us of Need to Protect Reproductive Freedom | US News: The Report
In November, a study by the Texas Policy Evaluation Project found that more than one in five women, ages 18 to 49, from across that state reported that they or someone they knew had tried to end a pregnancy on their own.
This may come as alarming news to those in public health who are preparing to celebrate the 43rd anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision on Jan. 22. But it is a stark reminder that, while Roe v. Wade was transformative, the provision of abortion care in the U.S. remains challenging.
The Precision Medicine Chimera | Project Syndicate
BOSTON/NEW YORK – US President Barack Obama’s administration recently issued an appeal for ideas to advance its “precision medicine initiative,” which will channel millions of federal research dollars toward efforts to tailor clinical treatment to individual patients. The idea of personalized medicine, which builds on dramatic advances in genetics and molecular biology, certainly sounds appealing – and not only in the United States, but also in Britain and elsewhere. Unfortunately, the assumption that precision medicine will benefit public health by improving clinical practice does not hold up.
This Is Why You Can't Always Trust Data | Fortune
Innovation. Ideation. Out-of-the-box problem-solving. Creative decision-making. So much of what we value in the brave new economy depends on people having fertile, expansive, and dynamically open minds. So it may come as a surprise to many that the default state for our minds seems to be, well, “closed.” Or at least inhospitable to ideas that differ from the ones already set in our consciousness.
Studying gun violence is the only way to figure out how to stop it – but we don't | The Conversation
It seems that not a week passes without a new report of a mass shootingin the United States.
The gun epidemic, long simmering, has in the past few weeks seemed to reach a new phase in the public discourse. The shootings in San Bernardino, California occasioned a nearly unprecedented front-page editorial in The New York Times, the country’s “paper of record,” together with comments, once again, from the president, urging congress to act on regulating firearms and firearm violence.