The Top 10 Global Health Issues to Watch in 2013 →
- The growing role of frontline health workers
- The need for more community health workers
- The rebirth of family planning
- Helping even more children to live longer
- AIDS: getting to zero
- The continuing fight against malaria
- Eradicating polio
- The global burden of non-communicable diseases
- Safety for health workers during conflicts
- Mobile health and new technologies
I’m presenting Sherpaa’s tech tonight at the NY Tech Meetup for the first time publicly. About 700 people are in the audience and it sells out in minutes. For those who can’t make it, you can watch the livestream. I’m very excited. Mostly because I’m just so proud of what we’re building— a platform that lets you very easily reach out to your Sherpaa doctors and lets our doctors power a new kind of virtual practice. And it’s also stunningly beautiful. We’ve got such a talented team. See you tonight!
Great example of using technology to influence human emotion ahead of surgery. - Alan, RVA
San Francisco, from Thierry Cohen’s “Darkened Cities” series.
Can you imagine a city night without the light? Watch THE CITY DARK, filmmaker Ian Cheney’s exploration of what we lose in a city’s ever-brightened night sky. Now streaming on POV ‘til Jan. 12.
“We believe, based on our experience, that good behaviors are indeed contagious.”
Daniel Zoughbie created Microclinic International to leverage the power of social network relationships to spread healthy behaviors throughout under-resourced communities.
Underlying MCI’s proposition is a bigger idea regarding how we conceptualize and approach global health. “We’re so accustomed to thinking about health in an individualistic and medicalized way,” said Zoughbie. Too often, this leads to diagnoses and treatments that are provided in isolation of patients’ social context, and a tendency to address the biological rather than social determinants of disease. But MCI, he said, “sees the social context as part of both the problem and the solution.
2012 Social Innovation Fellow Daniel Zoughbie, founder of Microclinic International
Find out more about how we can harness social contagion for social good.
The December issue of Smithsonian introduces the American Ingenuity Awards. dream hampton profiles Grammy Award winner Esperanza Spalding. Abigail Tucker on the high school sophomore who invented a new way to test for a deadly form of cancer and how one legal crusader is giving young people in America’s prisons a second chance.
Congratulations to 2011 Science Fellow Pardis Sabeti, recipient of the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for natural sciences. See Sabeti explain how her study of genomes has revealed a new approach to treating infectious diseases.
“Did you know that in 15 years depression alone will be the number one cause of disability globally, above heart disease, cancer and HIV?”
Giuseppe “Bepi” Raviola is a psychiatrist with Partners In Health, Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, working to integrate mental health services into global health care efforts.
Esther, center, talks with Zanmi Lasante psychologist Tatiana, left, and Shirley, a Zanmi Lasante social worker.
New Mental Health Program Launches in Haiti
When community health workers found Esther two years ago, she was living in a remote area of central Haiti, plagued by paranoia and voices in her head. Esther was taken to one of Zamni Lasante’s 10 hospitals, where she received social assistance, psychological support, and medication. Today, Esther reports that she is happy and symptom-free.
Fortunately, Esther’s condition was treatable. But the challenge in Haiti—and in the majority of developing countries—is that access to mental health care is extremely limited. In Haiti, there are just five psychiatrists and one neurologist for a population of 10 million.
PIH sister organization Zanmi Lasante (ZL) officially launched a new program today to both expand mental health screening and treatment in the Central Plateau and Lower Artibonite, and serve as a national model for mental health care throughout Haiti.
(via Giuseppe “Bepi” Raviola, PopTech Science Fellow 2012)
