BUniverse

Pandemics, Public Health, and Political Transition

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:00:00 EDT

Richard E. Besser, senior health and medical editor for ABC News and former acting director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), discusses the federal government’s response to the H1N1 influenza outbreak. He also shares the practical and political wisdom he gained while leading the CDC during the largest pandemic in forty years — while simultaneously reimagining and negotiating the organization’s role within a new presidential administration.

Besser says that his interim appointment at the CDC — which began the day after Barack Obama’s inauguration and ended in June — gave him the opportunity to expand the agency’s emergency-preparedness focus on “high-consequence, low-probability events” to include more routine public-health crises. He discusses the logistical factors that helped control the spread of swine flu during the spring, after it was first seen in California, Texas, and Mexico.

Besser also addresses the political aspects of crisis management, noting the CDC’s successes (convincing scared officials not to close the Mexico border) and failures (recommending school closures at the first sign of swine flu, a policy that was later rescinded). Ultimately, he says, consensus-building — among government agencies and with the public — is the key to crisis management, and to successful public health campaigns in general.

October 16, 2009, 3 p.m.

Sargent College

Video Length is 00:58:56.

About the Speaker:

As the senior health and medical editor for ABC News, Richard E. Besser provides on air and online analysis of medical issues. From January to June 2009, he was acting director of the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and acting administrator for the Agency for Toxic Substances and Diseases Registry, for which he received the Surgeon General's Medallion for leadership. Besser has worked for teh CDC in various capacities since 1991. He is a graduate of Williams College and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Solving the Health Care Reform Puzzle: How to Balance Cost, Access, and Quality

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:00:00 EDT

The first Discoveries Lecture of the 2009 academic year focuses on solutions for the health-care crisis. The BU panelists sharing their insights are Gary Young, chair of the department of health policy and management at the School of Public Health, Arlene Ash, a School of Medicine research professor of medicine and public health, and Stephen Davidson, a School of Management professor of business, policy, and law. Randall Ellis, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of economics moderates.

The speakers agree that the U.S. health-care system is broken and that solutions must help it to run more efficiently and at lower costs. One way to do this is to offer incentives to physicians and hospitals to provide quality care and prevent unnecessary and costly hospital visits and readmissions. Panelists also suggest that a more efficient system would include much more collaboration among physicians who are treating the same patient.

October 8, 2009,  7 p.m.
George Sherman Union

Video length is 01:16:40.

About the Speakers:
Gary Young is chair and professor of health policy and management at the School of Public Health. He also is associate director of the Center for Organization, Leadership, and Management Research in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, which is affiliated with Boston University. His writings and research have appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Health Services Research, Inquiry, Health Affairs, Medical Care, and Strategic Management Journal, among other publications. He was awarded the John D. Thompson Prize for Young Investigators from the Association of University Programs in Health Administration and an Investigator Award in Health Policy Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Arlene Ash is a School of Medicine research professor of medicine and public health, a School of Public Health adjunct research professor, and an expert in the application of statistical methods to questions of public policy. Her areas of interests include researching the differences in health-care service delivery and outcomes by race, sex, and age, Medicare, and systematic problems in health delivery systems. She is a fellow of the Academy of Health and of the American Statistical Association and past chair of the association’s health policy statistics section. Ash’s current research projects focus on racial disparities in health-care services for Medicare beneficiaries and on risk assessment of military populations to predict health-care cost and utilization.

Stephen Davidson is a School of Management professor of business, policy, and law. He also researches the management of health-care organizations. Davidson is the author of In Urgent Need of Reform: Saving the U.S. Healthcare System.

Future Challenges: Science, Diplomacy and Development

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 12:00:00 EDT

Zulfiqar Bhutta, professor and chair of the department of pediatrics and child health at the Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan, Harry Barnes, former U.S. ambassador to Romania, India, and Chile, and Patricia Wrightson, director of the Committee on Scientific Communication and National Security at the National Academies, speak about the challenges of public health science, science diplomacy, and the importance of international scientific cooperation in Central Asia, South Asia, and East Africa. Gerald Keusch, a School of Public Health professor of international health and associate dean for global health and Medical Campus associate provost for global health, moderates.

Speakers note the challenges coming from South Asia in terms of the lack of progress made in the awareness and importance of good health practices and their long-term gains to society. The lack of connection between advanced technology and science and fundamental issues of hygiene and public health has led to many infant and child deaths in Pakistan. They stress the need for perseverance, patience, and trust in areas of diplomacy and say that science plays a crucial role in diplomacy because it is a key to the world around us.

July 23, 2009, noon
Pardee House

Video length is 01:15:52.

About the speakers:
Harry Barnes is a former U.S. ambassador to Romania, India, and Chile. He also was the director general of the Foreign Service and director of personnel at the State Department. From 1994 to 2000, he was the director of the Carter Center’s Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Programs and on behalf of the center traveled to North Korea. He graduated from Amherst College and Columbia University and served in the U.S. Army from 1944 to 1946.

Zulfiqar Bhutta is professor and chair of the department of pediatrics and child health at the Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan. He was a visiting professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health in summer 2009. He attended Khyber Medical College and began his training in Pakistan, finishing in the United Kingdom. He is a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health in London. He has been awarded the Tamgha-i-Imtiaz (Medal of Excellence) by the president of Pakistan, the President of Pakistan Gold Medal for his contributions to child health in Pakistan, the Outstanding Pediatrician of Asia award from the Asia Pacific Pediatric Association, and the Aga Khan University Distinguished Faculty Award for Research.

Gerald Keusch is the Boston University’ Medical Campus associate provost for global health and a professor and associate dean for global health at the School of Public Health. He was director of the Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health and associate director for international research in the office of the NIH director before coming to Boston University. A graduate of Columbia College and Harvard Medical School, he is board certified in internal medicine and infectious diseases. His research ranges from the molecular pathogenesis of tropical infectious diseases to field research in nutrition, immunology, host susceptibility, and the treatment of tropical infectious diseases and HIV/AIDS. He has written more than 300 original publications, reviews, and book chapters, and he is the editor of 8 scientific books.

Patricia Wrightson is the director of the Committee on Scientific Communication and National Security at the National Academies in Washington, D.C. The committee promotes cooperation between the scientific and security communities.

Louis Sullivan Honors Carl Franzblau

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:00:00 EDT

Louis Sullivan (MED’58), president emeritus of the Morehouse School of Medicine and a former professor of medicine at Boston University, gives the keynote address at a symposium honoring Carl Franzblau, a School of Medicine professor, chairman of the biochemistry department, and associate dean of the Division of Graduate Medical Sciences. The Franzblau Symposium, held June 15-16, 2009, celebrated Franzblau’s numerous accomplishments as he ends his nearly fifty-year medical and teaching career, all of it spent at BU.

Sullivan describes Franzblau as a true leader, extolling the courage, determination, integrity, and flexibility he exemplified for his students. For instance, he recalls, Franzblau helped organize a program to increase African-American enrollment at medical schools in and around Boston. In 1968, Sullivan and Franzblau, along with eight other colleagues, invited African-American students from universities and colleges in the South to spend the weekend after Thanksgiving at one of New England’s medical schools. The program was so successful, Sullivan says, that the following year, black enrollment at the medical colleges involved in the program increased tremendously. Sullivan commends Franzblau for his continued efforts to increase diversity in the biomedical sciences and end health disparities

June 15, 2009, 7 p.m.

Metcalf Ballroom

Video length is 00:28:28.

About the speaker:

Louis Sullivan (MED’58) is founding dean and president emeritus of the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. Sullivan graduated from Morehouse College in 1954 and earned his medical degree at Boston University. He went on to serve as an instructor at Harvard Medical School and an assistant professor of medicine at Seton Hall College of Medicine in New Jersey. From 1966 to 1975, he taught medicine at Boston University Medical Center, where he also co-directed the hematology unit and founded the BU Hematology Service at Boston City Hospital. He later became the founding dean and director of the Medical Education Program at Morehouse College. When the medical school became independent from Morehouse College in 1981, Sullivan became its first dean and president. In 1989, he was appointed Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He returned to Morehouse School of Medicine in 1993 to serve as president until 2002.

2009 Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences Commencement Address: Rebecca Onie

Sun, 17 May 2009 09:00:00 EDT

Rebecca Onie is the chief executive officer of Project HEALTH, a social entrepreneurship program she cofounded with Boston Medical Center chief of pediatrics Barry Zuckerman, that mobilizes undergraduate volunteers to serve the health needs of more than 4,000 underprivileged families. First Lady Michelle Obama recently pointed to Project HEALTH as the inspiration for President Obama in asking Congress to appropriate $50 million for a social innovation fund.

Onie received her law degree from Harvard University in 2003. She clerked for the Honorable Diane P. Wood of the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. She has served as an associate at Miner, Barnhill & Galland P.C., where she represented civil rights and employment discrimination plaintiffs. In 2008, she was selected as a United States Ashoka Fellow and received Radcliffe College’s Jane Rainie Opel '50 Young Alumna Award. She is also a recipient of the Do Something Brick Award for Community Leadership, as one of ten “dynamic young people under the age of thirty, with the passion and drive to improve their communities by developing innovation strategies to create sustainable, positive change.”

May 17, 2009 9:00 a.m.

Track and Tennis Center

Video Length is 00:14:41.

The Future of Food: Closing Keynote Address

Sat, 09 May 2009 19:30:00 EDT

The Future of Food: Transatlantic Perspective
Session I: From Farm to Fork: The Global Food Chain
Session II: The End of Cheap Food: Food and Geopolitics
Session III: What’s in What You Eat? Food Safety in a New Ecology
Session IV: Eating Green: Food and Climate Change
Session V: What Is “Good” Food? The Ethics of Eating
Closing Keynote Address

Michael Ableman, a farmer, author, and sustainability advocate, delivers the closing keynote address of the conference The Future of Food: Transatlantic Perspectives. Ableman discusses his experience as a farmer in southern California — he founded one of the first organic farms in the region — and urges the need for all people, even city dwellers, to reconnect with nature and farming. Urban agriculture, he says, will be an essential component of feeding the world’s expanding population in the future. What we are experiencing today is much more than a food crisis, he argues — it is a crisis of awareness and participation. We forget, because we are so disconnected from our food, that farming should not be a “spectator sport,” he says. Structural changes to the world’s agricultural system will not happen, he concludes, until the impacts of our imperfect system become personal.

Ableman’s lecture ends a two-day conference of speakers, film screenings, and cooking demonstrations, held to examine the causes of the global food crisis while offering solutions for creating a sustainable food system. It was funded by the European Commission Delegation in Washington, D.C., with additional support from the Ford Foundation.

May 9, 2009 7:30 p.m.

765 Commonwealth Avenue

Video Length is 00:56:38.

About the Speaker:

Michael Ableman is the founder and executive director emeritus of the Center for Urban Agriculture at Fairview Gardens, a non-profit organization headquartered at one of the oldest organic farms in southern California. A photographer and author, he has published several books, including From the Good Earth: A Celebration of Growing Food Around the World (1993), On Good Land: The Autobiography of an Urban Farm (1998), and Fields of Plenty: A Farmer’s Journey in Search of Real Food and the People Who Grow It (2005). He received the Ecological Farming Association’s 2001 “Sustie” Award for his work in sustainable agriculture, the 1997 Environmental Leadership Award from the Governor of California, and Eating Well magazine’s 1995 Food Hero Award. At present, he farms on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia and is developing the Center for Art, Ecology & Agriculture.

The Future of Food: Transatlantic Perspectives

Sat, 09 May 2009 08:45:00 EDT

Satish Kumar, an international peace and sustainability activist and editor of Resurgence magazine, examines our crisis of food-related culture and spirit in the opening keynote address of the conference The Future of Food: Transatlantic Perspectives. Kumar, a former Jain monk, argues that gardening, farming, and cooking should be a spiritual practice. Factory farming has become a commodity, he says, and feeding people is now a mere byproduct of making money. Therefore, food goes to those who can afford it and those who cannot continue to go hungry, a system contrary to human and animal nature. For food to have a future, Kumar concludes, we must go back to considering food as sacred, and reconnect ourselves to nature and the land that provides our sustenance.

Kumar’s lecture kicks off the two-day conference of speakers, film screenings, and cooking demonstrations, held to examine the causes of the global food crisis while offering solutions for creating a sustainable food system. It was funded by the European Commission Delegation in Washington, D.C., with additional support from the Ford Foundation.

May 9, 2009, 8:45 a.m.

765 Commonwealth Avenue

Video Length is 00:30:06.

About the speaker:

Satish Kumar, a former Jain monk, is the editor and publisher of Resurgence, a magazine that promotes ecological sustainability, social justice, and spiritual values. A native of India, Kumar is also a nuclear disarmament advocate and peace activist, best known for his 8,000-mile peace walk to the capitals of nuclear-armed countries. He now resides in England, where he serves as the founder and program director of Schumacher College, a sustainability education center, and its counterpart secondary school, The Small School. He has written a number of books, including The Buddha and the Terrorist (2006), No Destination: An Autobiography (2004), and You Are, Therefore I Am: A Declaration of Dependence (2002).

Farm to Fork: The Global Food Chain

Sat, 09 May 2009 09:30:00 EDT

In the first session of the conference The Future of Food: Transatlantic Perspectives, three panelists — author Mark Winne, sustainability activist Helena Norberg-Hodge, and College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of international relations Henrik Selin — detail the industrialization of modern agriculture. Moderated by James McCann, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of history, the discussion explores the failings of government programs and the free market to support sustainable, healthful food policies.

The panel discusses how large-scale farmers receive the most government subsidies, leaving small-scale and organic farmers with little assistance. In addition, they say, the marketplace fails low-income Americans by setting the price of organic and nutritious foods at too high a cost. Americans need to support the localization of food systems by pushing for the deregulation of trade, they argue, which will slow the systematic distancing between people and their food sources.

The discussion is part of a two-day conference of speakers, film screenings, and cooking demonstrations, held to examine the causes of the global food crisis while offering solutions for creating a sustainable food system. It was funded by the European Commission Delegation in Washington, D.C., with additional support from the Ford Foundation.

May 9, 2009 9:30 a.m.

765 Commonwealth Avenue

Video Length is 01:26:42.

About the Speakers:

Helena Norberg-Hodge is founder and director of the International Society for Ecology and Culture (ISEC). Her environmental and cultural work with the people of Ladakh, a poor Indian Himalayan region, earned her the Right Livelihood Award, often called the “alternative Nobel Prize.” She is the author of several articles and books, including Ancient Futures: Lessons from Ladakh for a Globalizing World (1991; 2009).

Henrik Selin is a College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of international relations, a core faculty member of the Center for Energy and Environment Studies, and a fellow of the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. He also conducts research at the Centre for Climate Science and Policy Research at Linköping University in Sweden. He is co-editor of Changing Climates in North American Politics: Institutions, Policymaking, and Multilevel Governance (2009) and Transatlantic Environment and Energy Politics: Comparative and International Perspectives (2009).

Mark Winne is the author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty (2009). Previously, he was the executive director of the Hartford Food System in Connecticut, where he organized community self-help food projects and developed a commercial hydroponic greenhouse, the Connecticut Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program, and several farmers’ markets. He now spends his time writing and speaking about community food systems.

J ames McCann, College of Arts & Sciences professor of history and associate director of development at Boston University’s African Studies Center, is an expert in the agricultural and environmental history of Africa. His book Maize and Grace: Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop (2005) won the 2006 George Perkins Marsh Prize for best book in environmental history. He has held fellowships at Harvard and Yale Universities and has served as a consultant for organizations such as Oxfam and the United Nations Environmental Program.

The End of Cheap Food: Food and Geopolitics

Sat, 09 May 2009 11:30:00 EDT

Farming activist Benedikt Haerlin, food and trade policy expert Jim Harkness, and Frederick S. Pardee Professor of Global Public Policy Adil Najam tackle the problem of providing nutritious, affordable food to the world’s poor in the second session of the conference The Future of Food: Transatlantic Perspectives. The discussion, moderated by Timothy Wise of the Tufts University Global Development and Environment Institute, addresses the policies that contribute to the paradox of the growing number of hungry in the world — roughly one billion people — and the ever-increasing number of obese people, also one billion.

In many places, the speakers say, hunger is not a result of inadequate food production or outdated technology. Rather, in societies where hunger prevails, there is a social agreement that allows hunger to persist. One key to solving the world’s food problems, they suggest, is to reduce the world’s meat consumption. In addition, they say, the emergence of biofuels also threatens to increase the incidence of hunger and starvation in the world as land is farmed for fuel rather than food. The speakers propose that governments should reward farmers for food-growing efforts and invest in small farms, which not only produce food, but maintain ecosystems, social structures, and cultural and spiritual heritage.

May 9, 2009 11:30 a.m.

765 Commonwealth Avenue

Video Length is 01:35:26.

About the Speakers:

Benedikt Haerlin works for the Foundation on Future Farming in Berlin, the organizer of the international conference Planet Diversity. Haerlin also coordinates Europe’s “Save our Seeds” initiative, which strives to keep seeds free of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and is a member of the International Commission on the Future of Food. He has been a member of the European Parliament and the global coordinator of Greenpeace International’s Genetic Engineering Campaign.

Jim Harkness is president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and is the former executive director of the World Wildlife Fund in China. During the 1990s, he worked as the Ford Foundation’s Environment and Development program officer for China. In addition to writing and speaking on China and its development, he has served as an advisor to the World Bank and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization on those issues.

Adil Najam is the Frederick S. Pardee Professor of Global Public Policy, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of international relations and geography and environment, and the director of the Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University. He served as a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments that garnered the organization the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Timothy Wise is the director of the research and policy program at the Tufts University Global Development and Environment Institute. Wise previously served as executive director of Grassroots International, an aid organization based in Boston. He is a co-author of Confronting Globalization: Economic Integration and Popular Resistance in Mexico (2003) and A Survey of Sustainable Development: Social and Economic Dimensions (2001).

What's in What You Eat?: Food Safety in a New Ecology

Sat, 09 May 2009 14:00:00 EDT

Three food-safety advocates — Benedikt Haerlin of the Foundation on Future Farming, Helen Holder of Friends of the Earth Europe, and environmental attorney Andrew Kimbrell — tackle the major threats to the safety of the world’s food supply in the third session of the conference The Future of Food: Transatlantic Perspectives. The discussion, moderated by Frederick S. Pardee Professor of Global Public Policy Adil Najam, addresses the conflict over the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in modern farming.

The speakers argue that if humans want to protect the earth, they must buy food that is local, humane, biodiverse, and socially just; to keep the food supply safe and ethical, efficiency needs to be balanced with empathy. They discuss regulatory struggles between Europe and the United States and the effects of the EU’s reluctance to import and approve GMOs on the global food marketplace. Finally, the speakers address consumer concerns about the perceived and actual food safety issues associated with GMOs.

May 9, 2009 2:00 p.m.

765 Commonwealth Avenue

Video Length is 01:40:02.

About the Speakers:

Helen Holder is the genetically modified organism (GMO) campaign coordinator for Friends of the Earth Europe, the largest grassroots environmental network in Europe

Andrew Kimbrell, an environmental attorney, is executive director of the Center for Food Safety. He writes frequently on the environment, technology, law, and food issues. He edited Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture (2002) and has written several books, including Your Right to Know: Genetic Engineering and the Secret Changes in Your Food (2007)