TODAY: Semester’s First Forum to Discuss Public Health Issues at Guantanamo Bay Prison.

The semester’s first public health forum will be held on Sept. 11, 2013 and will examine timely and critical public health issues among prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp.

Sondra CrosbyThe featured speaker will be Sondra Crosby, MD, an associate professor of medicine at BU Medical School and the BU School of Public Health.

Dr. Crosby is an internist and former co-director of the Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights at Boston Medical Center. Her clinical practice focuses on care of asylum seekers and refugees, and she has written over 200 affidavits documenting medical and psychological sequelae of torture. She has published scholarly papers in multiple peer-reviewed journals in the field of caring for survivors of torture and was awarded the 2008 Leonard Tow Humanism in Medicine Award by the Arnold P. Gold Foundation.

She has served as a medical consultant to the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) to review evidence of torture. In addition to her work for the Commission, she was to return to Bahrain to examine dozens of hunger strikers protesting government actions.

In the past year, Dr. Crosby has taught medical forensics and has implemented the Istanbul Protocol for physicians in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan. She has also traveled to Reyhanli, Turkey to conduct training on effective medical documentation of alleged torture and to mentor Syrian physicians. In Istanbul, Turkey, Dr. Crosby trained physicians from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region on medical documentation of torture.

 The forum will be held from noon to 1 p.m. in Room L112. This forum is presented by the BUSPH Department of Health Law, Bioethics & Human Rights; and Global Lawyers & Physicians, a BUSPH-affiliated non-profit, non-governmental group that focuses on health and human rights issues.