New Essay Draws Important Parallels Between Public Health and Atrocity Prevention, Systems Designed to Protect From Harm

Cover of Politorbis magazine, #68, issue on Preventing Atrocities

FXB Center for Health and Human Rights Senior Fellow and Harvard T.H. Chan Professor Jennifer Leaning recently compared approaches to prevention and early warning in public health to those for mass atrocity.  Her essay, “Prevention in Public Health and Atrocity:  A Comparative Approach to Early Warning for Early Action,” appears in the latest issue of Politorbis, an official publication of the Swiss Foreign Ministry. As Leaning posits, “An understanding of…

Op-Ed: The coronavirus could hit the U.S. harder than other wealthy countries

Headshots of Dr. Mary T. Bassett and Dr. Natalia Linos

In an Washington Post op-ed published today, François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights Director Dr. Mary T. Bassett and Executive Director Natalia Linos write about how the United States’ response to the coronavirus is likely to reveal deep failures and reinforce existing health inequities. In it, they write: “The polarized political climate makes the threat posed by those long-standing inequities far more dangerous. At least three social phenomena…

Opioids: Policy to Practice

With the opioid epidemic affecting millions of Americans every year, leading universities have become hotbeds of research and innovation aimed at improving prevention, treatment, public policy and community response. The presidents of two institutions leading the way – the University of Michigan and Harvard University – have teamed up to organize a one-day summit to share new knowledge and best practices. Called “Opioids: Policy to Practice,” the summit on Friday,…

Powering the Personal Health Record: Catalysts and Barriers in India

Harvard FXB's Dr. Satchit Balsari speaks at the workshop.

Harvard FXB’s Dr. Satchit Balsari speaks at the workshop. On April 3rd, the India Digital Health Net (IDHN), a multidisciplinary research and development initiative established to support an Application Programming Interface-enabled (API) federated health data architecture in India, convened a workshop in New Delhi to learn from the several initiatives across the country that are building components of what may ultimately become India’s health tech grid.  The workshop was organized with support…

Commenting on Regulations, an Example: Proposed Change to Public Charge Ground of Inadmissibility

By Susan Lloyd McGarry Many in the public health community have concerns about the possible effects of proposed changes in regulations related to how US Citizenship and Immigration Services, Department of Homeland Security (US CIS, DHS) determines “public charge” as grounds to deny immigration visas and permanent residence. Harvard FXB sponsored an event in which experts discussed those concerns (read highlights of the event here). December 10 (coincidentally the seventieth…

Public Health & Climate Change

October 20, 2015. Public health practitioners are uniquely positioned to help build resilience to climate-related disasters at the community level. So argue George Luber and Harvard FXB Fellow Jay Lemery in a recent whitepaper on extreme weather events and their impact on human health. The paper comes in advance of their upcoming book, to be published next month (Wiley). This month Lemery also co-authored a blog on climate change and…