Awesome students and courageous CEOs Kudos to the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., where two weeks ago, a 19-year-old former student walked into the school and killed 17 innocent people, wounding more. Students, still grieving for lost friends, classmates and teachers, summoned the fortitude to go to their state capital...
It won’t stop until we stop it It happened again in America, and it will keep happening. It’s a tragic drama that we, with sadness and in horror, have watched play out in multiple cities and towns across our nation, which permits more guns than any other developed country. Last week, it was Marjory Stoneman...
I wrote an earlier blog post about reports that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had banned certain words from use in communications by the agency. As Slate, among many other sources, conveyed, they were relatively ordinary words, including vulnerable, evidence-based and fetus. I’m writing now because I recently received a wonderful...
Last Friday, The Washington Post reported a disturbing story regarding a list of “seven banned words,” purportedly a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) policy. The list was particularly disturbing because the prohibited words – diversity, entitlement, evidence-based, fetus, science-based, transgender and vulnerable – are ones frequently used in public health. The story precipitated more outrage than surprise, given...
Surely, there is room for compromise On Sunday, Nov. 5, another peaceful, normal routine was disrupted, and a place of solace was turned into a killing field. Predictably, some people again called for better regulation, while others said that “the problem is not the gun; it’s the mentally ill person carrying it.” In Sutherland, Texas,...
Las Vegas hits close to home When the news about Las Vegas broke, I decided that I was not going to write about another American gun-infused tragedy. I felt the resignation and frustration about which Steve Israel, a former congressional representative from New York, wrote in a New York Times column today: In the wake of...
The wrong thing to do I had a fantasy last weekend as the media kept reporting that the president would announce an end to the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigration program. I fantasized (in retrospect) that his exposure to the people of Houston, in their time of distress and peril, with thousands there...
Why historical context is critical I am reading Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Harvard University Press, 2009), by historian Adriane Lentz-Smith, PhD, associate professor of history at Duke University. Dr. Lentz-Smith is an alumna of Yale University who completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UNC-Chapel Hill. I found this book because the author...
Even today, one can be an optimist Tomorrow, we celebrate the birth of the United States. I assume that, as it has since 1922, the New York Times will publish the Declaration of Independence, and some will read it. We heard in the news today about the thousands who have died on the seas escaping Libya...
A lesson in climate change I’ve heard some brilliant faculty members talk about climate change, read many articles about it in Science magazine and other peer-reviewed journals (e.g., this Nature Geoscience article) as the data have been painstakingly collected, accumulated and analyzed, and listened to and talked with many really smart people on both sides...
Examining ourselves Every seven years, we are required to conduct a rigorous self-study and assess ourselves in relation to a set of criteria established by the accrediting body for public health, the Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH). The result of our self-examination is an almost 300-page report, provision of hundreds of documents and...
In the spirit of public health week, we offer a shout out for both basketball nets and safety nets. We love basketball in Chapel Hill. I love it! There’s nothing more exhilarating than watching the winning players make their ascent and take the game net apart, piece by piece. Despite the ups and downs of...