IAPHS BLOG
The IAPHS Blog is a virtual community that keeps population health professionals connected and up to date on the latest population health news, policy, controversies, and relevant research from multiple fields. Please note: Unless authored by IAPHS Staff, posts reflect views of individual authors, not those of IAPHS.
Book review: The Lives of Community Health Workers: Local Labor and Global Health in Urban Ethiopia, by Kenneth Maes, published by Routledge This deeply researched, intelligent, and persuasive book by Dr. Kenneth Maes addresses the moral economy of global aid for health. To fill the role of community health workers (CHWs), many poor countries extend the reach of their under-resourced public health systems by recruiting and training unpaid volunteers from poor, marginalized communities. The book describes the work of these volunteer CHWs in urban Ethiopia who willingly accept the task given to them: to provide care and support for their neighbors living with AIDS. What makes their unpaid work remarkable is that volunteers are themselves often struggling to make a living, and may themselves be HIV positive. The ART program sign at ALERT Hospital's main gate, 2007. Picture courtesy of Dr. Kenneth Maes. The global health organizations [...]
Learning from Slum Upgrading for Building Healthy Communities: An Interview with Jason Corburn
Recently, UC Berkeley Professor Jason Corburn was awarded an 18-month grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for his project “Learning from Slum Upgrading for [...]
A Report Card on National Government: How Will a New Government’s Policies Impact Population Health?
It’s time for a National Dashboard – a report card on how well policy-makers are supporting the conditions that allow people to be healthy. Population [...]
June Roundup: Population Health in the News
How are policy choices around the world affecting population health? HUD Housing Assistance, But Not Vouchers, Linked To Improvement in Health Measurements (American Journal of [...]
Register for the Austin Conference!
Registration is now open for Improving Population Health: Now, Across People’s Lives, and Across Generations to Come in Austin, Texas October 2-4, 2017. View the [...]
Blog Editors–Old and New
Every Monday since its launch on February 6, a new post has gone up on the IAPHS blog. Readers have treated themselves to a rich [...]
An Interview with Kristin Harper
Kristin Harper, who led the development of the IAPHS blog and brought it to life in February, talked with Executive Director Christine Bachrach recently about [...]
Theory, Measurement, Inference, and Action: How to Advance Research on Neighborhoods & Health?
Where people live matters for their health: this is a fundamental conviction among population health scientists, but how much do we really know about how [...]
Gossip as Data
The AIDS epidemic in Africa looks much like the medieval Black Death did, beginning with a rise in mortality, followed eventually by a decline. One [...]
How to Talk About Population Health
Elsewhere on the Blog you can find a definition of population health. A useful starting place, for sure, but no place you’d care to end [...]
Global Health Narratives for Youth
A Way to Introduce Global Population Health Issues to Middle School and High School Students As we witness millions of people worldwide suffering from preventable [...]
Interpreting Conflict in the Past: Applying the Dirty War Index to a Bioarchaeological Setting
More and more, researchers are beginning to appreciate the importance of studying the effects of conflict on population health. As physical anthropologists looking for ways [...]
Framing Matters: How Sharing Personal Stories May Help Dismantle Addiction Stigma and Increase Access to Treatment
Image from PBS.org -News Hour Sheena is a young woman raising two young sons on her own in North Carolina. She ferries her [...]