It’s time to put a floor under the price of gasoline. The climate talks going on in Paris this week will determine how many hundreds of millions of people will be displaced by climate change. At stake is whether the planet warms by 4 degrees Celsius, or only about 2 degrees. The effects of a […]
Author Archives: Fred Zimmerman
The always fascinating podcast Talking Headways has done an interview with Fielding School Professor Dick Jackson, and it’s a great listen. Dick has been a major thought-leader in public health for years, and this interview shows why. With insight and erudition Dick takes on the health implications of urban planning and climate change, and argues […]
Voters across the political spectrum are concerned about income inequality, but inequality hardly ends with the paycheck. In fact, it continues each time you open your wallet. Many studies show that income inequality is inversely related to population health, and they typically use inequality in stated income. The effects of taxes and transfers can […]
Check out the great public health advocacy comic book from The City Project. Zounds! Coool stuff.
I don’t agree with the scientific views of those who think vaccines are harmful. I think the science showing huge net benefits of required vaccines is quite clear, and moreover, I know just where the rumor about supposed vaccine dangers came from originally. Nonetheless, public health ethics requires us to give due deference to people’s […]
We can’t do good public health if we don’t recognize it when we see it. Without an adequate definition, the unique lens of public health is fuzzy. In writing about the future of public health in 1988, an IOM committee pronounced public health to be “in disarray.” Part of the problem was a generally fuzzy […]
Corn is much maligned in public health because of its use in stuffing beef cattle till they fart. And of course high-fructose corn syrup. But corn doesn’t have to be all bad, so let’s take a moment to look at the bright side. An American maize researcher in Mexico is working with New […]
My astute friend Lia asked me what is up with Vitamin D. And indeed, sales are up (by about 1000% over the course of the 2000s), and Google searches are up (by a factor of about 4 since 2004 on both Vitamin D and Vitamin D Deficiency). In the last 10 years or so, […]
Emily Oster thinks that screen time for kids is probably fine. Her analysis is both original and well-considered—just not in the same places. Economists, more than people from any other discipline it seems to me, love to write outside their area of expertise. You can find economists confidently telling you about how marriages work, […]
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My original post on racial profiling provoked quite a discussion on the Spirit of 1848 listserve. A colleague wrote that he wasn’t sure that racial profiling has a profound effect on health outcomes. Indeed not. But I use the word “profound” not as a simple synonym of “big”, but to mean deep — going down many […]