Really? This guy is clueless. The administration and professors at OSU must have missed this memo because they can still penalize you for not showing up regardless of the reason. COVID or not.
I am an Assistant Professor of Exposure Assessment Science at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the founding director of the Healthy Buildings Program. I also have a new book, out last month: Healthy Buildings. In March 2020, I became co-chair of the International Well Building Institute’s Coronavirus Task Force.
For several years in private industry before joining the faculty at Harvard, I led teams of scientists and engineers investigating, and resolving, hundreds of indoor environmental quality issues, from'sick buildings' to cancer clusters to all types of chemical/radiological/biological hazards. I learned two important facts: 1) too often we are responding to issues after there is a problem, and 2) we cannot solve these problems without a multidisciplinary approach. I have an interest in the dynamic interplay between the indoor environment and health and am continuing this line of research at Harvard, with a focus on optimizing indoor environments for health benefits. A natural extension of my research on buildings and the indoor environment is the consideration of the products we use in those environments, and how those influence our exposure and health.
I believe that we have to force a collision between these two disciplines: building science and health science. The indoor built environment (homes, offices, schools, hospitals, airplanes, laboratories) plays a critical role in our overall health, both due to the amount of time we spend indoors (~90%) and the ability of the buildings to positively and negatively influence our exposure. The goal is to improve the health of all people, in all buildings, everywhere, every day.
The pandemic spawned by the novel coronavirus has given us a heightened awareness of the role our buildings play in our health and wellbeing. I'm on the record back in early February advocating for healthy buildings strategies, like air filtration and increased ventilation, to reduce the spread of the virus indoors. Since then, I've written several articles about what we can do to reduce our exposure to the virus, including in grocery stores, [public parks](https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/13/keep-parks-open-benefits-fresh-ai
... keep reading on reddit ➡
Hello, reddit!
I am Tyler VanderWeele, professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and I study the mechanisms by which religion and spirituality affect health outcomes.
A recent study I led found that women who attended religious services more than once per week were more than 30% less likely to die during a 16-year-follow-up than women who never attended. We found that attending religious services increases social support, discourages smoking, decreases depression, and helps people develop a more optimistic or hopeful outlook on life. You can read the study here.
Another recent study found that women attending church services at least weekly were at five-fold lower risk for suicide, with an even larger effect for Catholics. You can read that study here.
More information about the Harvard programs supporting this research can be found here and here.
EDIT: Hi everyone, it's 11:00 a.m. ET and I'm here to answer your questions! And a reminder that we've posted the links to the full studies above.
EDIT 2: It's 1:20 p.m. ET and unfortunately I have to sign-off. Thank you for all your great questions!
Hello, reddit!
My name is Alex Lu and I’m Associate Professor of Environmental Exposure Biology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. I study the decline of honeybee populations around the world. My team’s research has traced the collapse of honeybee colonies to a group of pesticides called neonicotinoids, and we’ve also published studies showing just how widespread these pesticides are in some areas. Here is a link to the full 2012 paper
The honeybee decline is a critical issue and the future of global agriculture—and our food supply—hinges on our ability to address it. Approximately one-third of the foods we commonly consume—apples, pears, blueberries, strawberries and so on—require pollination, and honeybees happen to be the most effective pollinator for agricultural production. The European Union (EU) has already taken action. Since December 2013, the EU has banned three most widely use neonicotinoid pesticides in crops that attract bees for pollination. Ontario, Canada also passed a bill in 2015 to restrict neonicotinoids uses in agriculture. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is currently in the midst of a review of neonicotinoids.
I’ll be here to answer your questions from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM ET; Ask Me Anything!
Edit (10:45 AM): Welcome everybody. I wish all have a wonderful Thanksgiving. And thank you for submitting your questions. There are lots of them. Due to the time constraint, I won't be able to answer all your questions. For some questions, my answer will be brief. I already looked at some of the questions, and I believe that this is going to be a very informative and educational session about the losses of bees and what we can do to reverse the trend. Let's get started.
Edit (1:00 PM): It's been a little over two hours and I do need to go now. Thank you for all your questions.
I went on this sub to try and build context for comparing the health effects of canola oil to other oils, but the comments were confusing and intellectually disorienting for the average person. A notable problem was the use of various studies on each side of the pro/anti canola oil debate. I then stumbled upon this article on Harvard's School of Public Health page: the author notes many of the the concerns about canola oil, and explains why most are negligible (his note about trans-fats in it, by contrast, is a warning concerning deceitful advertising).
The whole series has some interesting articles that I thought might appeal to members of this sub, so I decided to share it, since I couldn't find anything referencing it in the sub's history (at least through my novice search methods).
Lastly, this isn't a plug for Harvard (boo Harvard, booooo), but rather a call for deference to health experts. I would be curious to know what you all think of the series.
Hello, reddit!
I’m Dr. Nancy Krieger, Professor of Social Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. My research focuses on how people’s health can be influenced by the conditions in which they are born, live and work, including how economic policies and systems, social norms, social policies, and political systems can affect health. My research also focuses on health inequities and how we can improve monitoring of health inequities, that is, unfair, unnecessary, and preventable differences in health status across social groups.
In a new paper released on December 8, 2015 in PLoS Medicine, “Police Killings and Police Deaths Are Public Health Data and Can Be Counted,” my research team and I proposed that all law enforcement-related deaths—including people killed by police as well as police killed in the line of duty—be treated not just as criminal data but as a “notifiable condition,” and that they be reported to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) by public health and medical professionals and published on a weekly basis as are a host of other conditions ranging from poisonings to pertussis to polio.
It is time to bring a public health perspective to this problem from a standpoint that emphasizes prevention and health equity. These deaths, like other violent deaths, are not a matter for criminal justice only. Their health impact includes and extends beyond those killed and their families to the broader communities in which these deaths occur and society overall.
To support our case, we presented data showing that, over the past 50 years, black men in the US have faced significantly greater risk than white men of being killed by police. In 1965, among black and white men ages 15-34 across the U.S., blacks were eight times more likely to be killed by police than whites; by 2005, blacks’ excess risk had declined, but was still three times higher than that of whites, on par with current estimates. We also found variations in risk across U.S. cities over time. New York and Cleveland have been particularly risky cities for blacks; in both cities, between 1960 and 2011, depending on the year, blacks’ risk of being killed by police ranged anywhere from 5 to 19 times higher than that of whites.
You can read more about our study on our website [here]( http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/call-for-police-kil
... keep reading on reddit ➡Science AMA Series: We are Sarah Fortune and Eric Rubin, researchers at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, who study how drug resistance evolves in bacteria, and we’re here to answer your questions!
Hi, reddit!
We are Sarah Fortune and Eric Rubin, researchers at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. Although our research focuses on tuberculosis, we are generally interested in how drug resistance evolves in bacteria and how we can subvert the development of resistance.
Antibiotics have helped reduce infectious diseases, particularly those caused by bacteria, from one of the most common causes of death to diseases that are mostly completely curable. However, as each new antibiotic has been developed, resistance to each has slowly or, in some cases, rapidly emerged. There have been some cases that are highly publicized, including the recent infection of a woman with a strain of bacteria that was resistant to a rarely-used but useful last ditch antibiotic, colistin. This case, in Pennsylvania, was the first example of this type of resistance mechanism in the US. But antibiotic resistance is increasing throughout the world, both in hospitals, which have long harbored highly resistant organisms, and in community settings.
How much of a threat is this? What can we do about it?
We’ll be back at 3 pm EST (noon PST, 8 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask us anything!
EDIT - Whoa. We are blown away by the amount of interest. We’ll try to get to as many of these as we can. And since we’re at different locations you might see more than one answer to many of your questions. Hopefully, we’ll be on the same page. But, if we’re not, our disagreements probably reflect a range of opinions in the field. Thanks for all the great questions and ideas!
EDIT - Okay, it's 4:30 and we're going to have to call it. But thanks for the amazing questions and enthusiasm!
Hello, reddit! I’m Vasanti Malik, a research scientist in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the director of the Global Nutrition and Epidemiologic Transition Initiative at Harvard. My research focuses on evaluating dietary risk factors for obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease with an emphasis on diet quality. More recent research interests include studying nutritional drivers of the global obesity and diabetes epidemics in countries undergoing epidemiologic transition.
In January, U.S. officials released a new set of Dietary Guidelines—broad advice on how the nation should eat. These new Guidelines included some significant changes from previous versions, including the recommendation no more than 10% of a person’s daily calories come from added sugars. This is the first time the Guidelines set an upper limit for added sugar intake. Another important change is the removal of an upper limit for total dietary fat, and a greater emphasis on consuming certain types of fat.
But there were also some omissions, which have drawn criticism from nutrition scientists. The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee—a group of scientists who made recommendations about what should be included in the Guidelines—called for specific guidance regarding reduced consumption of red meat and sugar-sweetened beverages. These were not included.
Overall, these Guidelines do represent an important step towards helping Americans identify healthy dietary patterns.
I’ll be here from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. EST to answer your questions about the Dietary Guidelines and nutrition; Ask Me Anything!
EDIT: It's a little before 11:00 a.m. and I'm here to start answering questions!
EDIT TWO: It's 1:20 p.m. and I do have to sign off now. Thanks for all your great questions!
"We need to push our local, state, and national leaders"
The WBUR article above is linked on the Harvard School Of Public Health website
Harvard School Of Public Health
I said in an earlier post that I would only back a shut-down plan and contacting reps if the scientific medical community was backing it. Well, looks like they're backing it.
Baker has tightened things down quite a bit, but not to the standards that this article is calling for.
Hello, reddit!
I’m Dyann Wirth, Chair of the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health and Director of the Harvard Malaria Initiative. I also serve on the board of the University-wide Defeating Malaria: From the Genes to the Globe initiative.
Malaria’s impact across the globe is vast: Nearly half of the world’s population—about 3.2 billion people—is at risk of malaria. And an estimated 283 million people are infected every year—most of them young children in impoverished Sub-Saharan Africa. Recently, President Obama pledged to wipe out malaria. I told the New York Times that we currently don’t have the “arsenal” to eradicate malaria today, but it's a goal that we’re working towards.
My lab’s research has provided new insight into how the malaria parasite has evolved, allowing us to better understand the fundamental biology of the parasite and the mechanisms of drug resistance. Our team at the Harvard Malaria Initiative employs sophisticated laboratory approaches to understand the underlying causes of drug resistance identify and screen potential new drugs and drug targets, rapidly translate new findings into practical treatments, and train researchers and global public health professionals from the U.S. and malaria endemic regions.
I’ll be here from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. ET to answer your questions about malaria; Ask Me Anything!
EDIT:
It's 1:00 p.m. ET and I'm now here to answer your questions!
EDIT AGAIN:
Thank you so much for your great questions! If you want to see more about how you can help us fight malaria, check out this video.
Hello, reddit!
I’m Ben Sommers, Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Economics in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. I’m interested in researching health policy for vulnerable populations, the uninsured, and the health care safety net, and have served as a senior advisor in health policy to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. In addition to being a health economist, I’m also a practicing primary care doctor and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston.
I recently led a study that found the variable approaches states have taken to implementing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) have had major effects on whether low-income adults are aware of the law, whether they have applied and obtained coverage, and whether or not they think the law has helped them. Our research focused on Arkansas, Kentucky, and Texas—states that have taken markedly different approaches to implementing the ACA:
-
Kentucky expanded Medicaid, created a well-functioning state Marketplace, and supported outreach efforts; -
Arkansas expanded coverage to low-income adults using private insurance instead of Medicaid, and placed legislative limitations on outreach; -
Texas did not expand Medicaid, and passed restrictions making it hard for organizations and individuals to assist people applying for coverage.
In addition to the impact of state policies, one of the main takeaways of this research is that many low-income adults are still unaware of the health care reform law despite its passage in 2010.
You can read the full study over at Health Affairs: http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/34/6/1010.full (Note: The study is typically only available to subscribers, but Health Affairs agreed to make the study available for free for this AMA. It will be open from 8:00 a.m. to Noon EDT.)
I’ll be here at 11:00 a.m. EDT to answer your questions about the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, and access to care; ask me anything!
EDIT at 11:10 a.m.: Hi everyone - Happy to be here for the AMA today, lots of good questions. But first, hot off the presses - the Supreme
... keep reading on reddit ➡Hello! Got into the SM program for global health and population and just feel that I know MUCH more about other schools than I do about Harvard (without having visited one of the other options)
Is anyone a current student or alumnus and might be willing to answer some Qs for me?
Would greatly appreciate it!
https://www.healthykitchens.org/program
How many doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals truly understand the latest scientific evidence to distinguish "healthy" versus less healthy or unhealthy foods? How many know how best to successfully engage their patients to improve their dietary choices and practice mindful eating and lifestyle strategies? How many can serve as role models, coaches, and teachers to shift the way adults think about purchasing, preparing, and enjoying healthy and delicious foods? During this three-day conference, faculty members from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School, and other leading institutions present the current research on diet, nutrition, and lifestyle choices as they affect health.
World-class chefs from The Culinary Institute of America and beyond join these experts to lead demonstrations and hands-on teaching sessions (literally in the kitchen) for healthcare professionals who want to learn about selection, purchase, and preparation strategies and techniques for healthy cooking. Conference attendees not only are exposed to the latest systematic reviews of nutrition science, they also taste, prepare, and learn to teach others to enjoy a broad selection of foods that can reduce disease risk and, ideally, replace unhealthy habits throughout a lifetime.
Participants have the opportunity to learn about, taste, and prepare foods in The Culinary Institute of America at Copia Teaching Kitchens under the direction of professional chef educators.
Meals served throughout the course are an intrinsic part of the curriculum. Attendees gather in this celebrated facility in one of the most magical landscapes in the United States to learn how to communicate concepts of healthy food selection and preparation to their patients and clients.
Due to the interactive, hands-on nature of the program, space is very limited and early registration is highly recommended.
You know I like keeping track of this stuff - this is epidemiology high carb nonsense - and they usually announce stuff here or show embarrassing stuff. If you're here - please post in the comments or describe what it's like. Is keto being discussed at all?
Through plenary lectures, culinary demonstrations, hands-on kitchen sessions, interactive workshops, and meals and tastings, the conference program achieves the following course objectives:
- Summarize what we know about opportun
Hello, reddit!
I’m Samuel Myers, a senior research scientist in the Department of Environmental Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and I’m here to talk about Planetary Health. As part of my Planetary Health research, I lead five multidisciplinary research teams investigating 1) the global nutritional impacts of rising concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere; 2) the health impacts of land management decisions in SE Asia associated with forest fires and particulate air pollution; 3) the nutritional impacts of reduced access to wildlife (bushmeat) in the diet in Madagascar; 4) the local (in Madagascar) and global consequences of fisheries decline for human nutrition and health; and 5) the impact of animal pollinator declines on human nutrition at a global scale. Planetary health is a growing field focused on understanding the many ways that human transformation of all of Earth’s natural systems—the climate, oceans, land use, freshwater systems, and other ecosystems—impacts human health.
I recently authored two studies in The Lancet that showed changing environmental conditions around the globe caused by human activity could negatively impact the health of millions of people by altering the amount and quality of key crops. One study found that decreasing numbers of food pollinators such as bees—falling in part due to pesticide use and destruction of habitats—could lead to declines in nutrient-rich crops that have been linked with staving off disease. A second study found that increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) could lead to lower levels of zinc in food and thus to greatly expanded zinc deficiency. You can read an [article about both of these studies here](http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/human-wrought-environmental-changes-impacting-crops-and-pollinators-could-harm-health-of-mil
... keep reading on reddit ➡Hello, reddit!
My name is William Mair, and I’m an assistant professor of genetics and complex diseases at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. My lab recently published a paper in Nature which, for the first time, reveals a causal link between a process known as “RNA splicing” and aging. This research sheds important light on when and how our cells deteriorate over time. Aging is a key risk factor for a variety of chronic diseases, and our lab is working to identify what’s happening at the molecular level in various organ systems that allows these diseases to occur.
What is RNA splicing? In order for bodies—and cells—to maintain youthfulness, they must also maintain proper homeostasis. At the cellular level, that means keeping the flow of biological information, from genes to RNA to proteins, running smoothly and with the right balance. While a considerable amount is known about how dysfunction at the two ends of this process—genes and proteins—can accelerate aging, strikingly little is known about how the middle part, which includes RNA splicing, influences aging. Splicing enables one gene to generate multiple proteins that can act in different ways and in disparate parts of the body.
To find this link, we designed a series of experiments in the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans to probe the potential connections between splicing and aging. Because the worms’ cells are transparent we were able to use fluorescent genetic tools to visualize the splicing of a single gene in real-time throughout the aging process. After five days, some worms showed a youthful pattern of splicing while others exhibited one indicative of premature aging. We were able to use these differences in splicing (reflected fluorescently) to predict individual worms’ lifespans prior to any overt signs of old age.
We still have much more to learn about this, but the findings open up an entirely new avenue of investigation that could help us understand how to live longer and healthier.
I’ll be here to answer your questions from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM EST; Ask Me Anything!
EDIT: It's 11:00 AM and we're getting underway. Thanks for all your questions so far! I'm also joined here by /u/carolineheintz, the first author of the paper.
EDI
... keep reading on reddit ➡Hi, reddit!
I’m John McDonough, Professor of the Practice of Public Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and an expert on health care policy.
Between 2008 and 2010, I served as a Senior Advisor on National Health Reform to the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions where I worked on the development and passage of the Affordable Care Act. My research has appeared in Health Affairs, the New England Journal of Medicine, and other journals. And I’ve written three books, including Inside National Health Reform, published in September 2011. I recently answered questions about the book, and health care policy, as part of a Vox “book club.”
I’ll be here at 3:00 PM ET to answer your questions about the Republican alternative to the Affordable Care Act that is called the American Health Care Act. And we can talk about Monday's new estimate on the AHCA from the Congressional Budget Office.
Proof: https://twitter.com/HarvardChanSPH/status/842054773222305792
Edit: It's 3:00 PM ET and I'm here to answer your questions!
Edit 2: It's 4:00 PM ET and I have to run. Thank you for all your great questions!
