Healthcare

BY JEAN-BAPTISTE LE MAROIS Most climate change awareness campaigns feature stranded polar bears on drifting ice sheets, or sea levels creeping over the island of Manhattan. But are these strategies convincing? The “protect the planet” approach has proven to be too weak of a public narrative to mobilize voters. Instead, imagine opening the newspaper to […]

BY CLAIRE CHAUMONT “From now on it can be said that plague was the concern of all of us.” The Plague, A. Camus, 1947[1] On 24 January 2014, the head of Meliandou health post, a sparsely populated village in Guinea, West Africa, informed district health officials of five cases of an unknown infectious disease characterized […]

BY CHRISTIAN ASANTE African societies have made enormous strides with respect to women’s rights and empowerment. Mother’s Day is widely recognized and celebrated in many parts of Africa.  On that holiday, people will call and send text messages to their mothers; hashtags will trend; and politicians, governments and gender ministries will issue press statements praising […]

An Interview with Dr. Elisa Choi Commissioner, Commonwealth of Massachusetts Asian American Commission Dr. Elisa Choi is the Chairperson of the Asian American Commission of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the chair of its Health and Human Services Committee. She is also the Governor-elect of the Massachusetts Chapter of the American College of Physicians, where […]

BY JENNIFER HELFRICH I am an environmentalist. Friends call me a “tree hugger.” Tree huggers are a rare breed here at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS). My fellow students each have their public policy area of focus—and the environment is not one of them. I understand the dilemma; HKS students tend to exhaust themselves through […]

BY BRIAN CHIGLINSKY “I think I’m going to start with Fred.” I nodded. “That makes sense.” Fred was Nathan’s brain tumor. Fred was also a tried and true opener. It was a little weird, grabbed your attention, and then gave you a bridge into the real story about Nathan’s health insurance. Nathan even described Fred […]

Despite more than three decades of empirical evidence from sociological and anthropological research that clearly shows that culture plays a significant role in the health care decision making process within Latino society, Latino cultural beliefs still remain the least understood among service providers in the American health care delivery system. This is in part due […]

Climate change has arrived. It is no longer simply a threat for the hypothetical future generations, but a problem for our generation, and particularly, our children’s generation. For the first time, 2015 saw the global average temperature hit 1°C above than the pre-industrial era, moving perilously closer to the 1.5°C limit that countries committed to […]

BY NATALIE GOODNOW AND BOBBIE RAGSDALE Today is International Women’s Day, a fitting time to discuss a topic at the forefront of the news over the last several months: abortion and women’s rights. Though abortion has been legal for decades, the issue is still a contentious one in the public sphere. Unfortunately, many people today […]

BY MAGGIE SALINGER Republicans are trying to seduce us by promising lower premiums and removal of the individual mandate. No longer will Obamacare encroach on personal freedom and financial stability, they boast. But let’s not be fooled by the ACA alternatives we’ve been seeing from the Hill. These plans are no better for us. In fact, […]

BY ANN CRAWFORD-ROBERTS & SIDRA BONNER Congressional Republicans have vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as their first priority in the new Trump administration. Even before Trump takes office, the Senate and House have voted to initiate the process to gut major parts of the law commonly referred to as Obamacare. Following the […]

  In times of conflict, humanitarian organizations aim to meet the “basic needs” of those in crisis. But too often this model of emergency intervention ignores chronic conditions – and especially the pressing question of mental health, according to Fouad M. Fouad, a professor at the Faculty of Health Sciences at the American University of […]