Tag Archives: Public Health

When I was growing up in East Tennessee in the 1960s, there was a local grocery chain owner and right-wing politician named Cas Walker who railed about, among other things, water fluoridation. Water fluoridation was alleged to be a communist plot. If so, then God must be a communist, since water in some parts of the country is naturally fluoridated. In fact, that natural fluoridation, and its correlation with lower incidence of tooth decay, helped...

Cutting through the BS surrounding Chinese government's response to the coronavirus.But the origin of the virus is yet unestablished. This is a limitation on prevention.East Asia ForumHas the internet helped China contain the coronavirus?Mu Li | Professor of International Public Health at the Sydney School of Public Health, The University of Sydney

Effective, efficient, and inexpensive. Poor sanitation is responsible for 80 percent of world health issues, like infectious disease, and four percent of deaths. That may sound small, but in context, it is about 1,500 children every day. It can also lead to chronic illnesses that plague both children and adults. In areas without plumbing, the options are dumping and hauling sewage, which can be both expensive and dangerous… Public toilets also mean more women and girls are subject to...

We have previously discussed how environmental dangers remain something of an abstraction for most people who fail to recognize that changes in air or water pollution standards results in high and quantifiable rises in death rates. Even changes in areas like shipping fuels can translate to thousands of deaths. However, since these deaths are not immediate and borne privately, the true costs of pollution are often dismissed. I have been highly critical of the environmental record of the...