April 5, 2023—The Department of Global Health and Population at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health marked its 60th anniversary with a symposium focused on global health security. The March 28 event, held in Kresge Cafeteria, included panel discussions on health misinformation and climate change, followed by a reception at which student research posters were displayed and awarded prizes.
In her opening remarks, Chair Marcia Castro, Andelot Professor of Demography, shared highlights of the Department’s history and accomplishments. Established in 1962 as the Department of Demography and Human Ecology, GHP is the first department of population sciences in any school of public health to focus on global health from the beginning. Throughout its history, members of the Department have helped shape the global health field and launched major contributions in areas including health system reform, maternal and child health, and humanitarian response. Read more about the history of the Department.
While there have been many achievements in improving global health security over the past few decades, the COVID-19 pandemic made it clear that there is much more to do, said Dean Michelle Williams. Calling herself a proud alumna and faculty member of the Department, Williams said that GHP is well-positioned to continue this work with its partners around the globe.
She noted that traditional defenses and protections are no longer enough to keep people safe given that, according to CDC estimates, it’s now possible for a pathogen to spread from a remote village to the world’s major cities in less than 36 hours. The mounting challenges posed by climate change further add to the need to strengthen global health security, she said.
Planning for global security threats requires anticipating the future, said Marcelo Medeiros, visiting professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University, in his keynote address. But he noted that it would be arrogant to think that the future will follow our plans. Therefore, he said, public health policies must be resilient and adaptable to realities. His current list of priorities includes moving more people towards sustainable plant-based diets, tackling health disinformation, and adopting equitable “pro poor” policies that meet the needs of the two-thirds of the world’s population who live on $10 a day or less.
The first panel continued the discussion on health misinformation. As the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated, public health authorities need to be proactive in putting out information that addresses people’s concerns in a format that is easy to find, understandable, accessible, and sharable, panelists said. In the absence of reliable information from trusted sources, people will seek out their own answers and potentially become vulnerable to misinformation.
While it can be difficult to change people’s minds once they’ve encountered misinformation, “prebunking”—providing people with information ahead of time that can inoculate them from falling for misinformation—may prove more effective. For example, Kevin Croke, assistant professor of global health, and colleagues found that South African study participants who regularly received a fact-checking podcast on WhatsApp became more skeptical of health misinformation that they encountered.
Speakers on the climate change panel discussed how to more comprehensively factor health outcomes into the social cost of carbon—a measure used by policymakers to weigh the cost of damage from each additional ton of carbon emissions, or the benefit of any action taken to reduce a ton of carbon emissions. More study is needed on climate-sensitive health outcomes, panelists said. These include both direct effects such as mortality caused by air pollution, and indirect effects such as reduced nutritional quality in plants and harms to mental health.
It’s important to be able to explain the mechanisms that cause climate change to affect health, said Kari Nadeau, chair of the Department of Environmental Health and John Rock Professor of Climate and Population Studies. She noted that even after it was clear that tobacco smoke was harmful to the human body, more research was needed to show exactly why. “Then you could actually change policy,” she said. “There was no refuting that tobacco smoke causes cancer after you understood the mechanisms.”
Heat is one area where the mechanisms are becoming clear, she said. “Heat actually induces changes in our immune system, induces breakdown of cells in our body,” she said. This can lead to irreversible inflammatory changes, which have been observed in the blood of agricultural workers and others suffering from chronic exposure to high heat.
Nadeau and other panelists noted the importance of considering inequity in measuring who is most likely to be harmed by climate change, and who is able to access the benefits of mitigation and adaptation measures.
– Amy Roeder
Photos: Ben Gebo