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As mentioned in the post, “UN Campaign Seeks to Give all Children a Shot at Life,” one in five children does not have access to vaccines that prevent deadly diseases, like measles, pneumonia, or diarrhea.  Nonetheless, some 2.5 million children under the age of 5 die every year as the result of preventable infectious disease, mostly due […]

A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine reports that as many as one in ten cases of tuberculosis in China is multi-drug-resistant, with eight percent of those cases being extensively drug-resistant (XDR). One in four cases is resistant to at least one drug. Although China has a relatively low prevalence rate (108 […]

It’s an oft-repeated saying that, in the fashion world, “what goes around, comes around”. On a much grander scale, this is what has happened in the South Pacific in a clothing role-reversal. When missionaries ventured into the region in the early 19th century hoping to convert the various island populations to Christianity, they naturally brought […]

While the North African revolutions of the past year and a half swept away several long-serving dictators, sadly rulers with an ironclad hold on power remain in various parts of the world.  In Cambodia, Prime Minister Hun Sen has ruled the country since 1985 and shows no signs of relinquishing power. He is the longest-serving […]

As I wrote in the recent post, The Joy and Burden of Motherhood, “The greatest joy of motherhood is seen as the sheer gift of bringing a life into this world and helping to shape them from the moment of birth and then to watch them grow into a happy, productive and successful member of […]

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda has announced his decision to restart two nuclear reactors in western Japan. As I noted in this blog a month ago, all of Japan’s nuclear reactors are offline. Before the Fukushima meltdown, 30% of the nation’s electricity came from uranium fission reactors. As a result of these shutdowns, there is […]

Last Friday, Stanford’s Policy Review published a feature written by global health luminaries Mark Dybul, Peter Piot, and Julio Frenk entitled Reshaping Global Health.  The article reads as a call to action, urging the global health community to “give up a lot of turf” and assemble a Bretton Woods-style conversation to reshape the Global Health […]

The following piece was originally published in on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.  by  R. Scott Kemp R. Scott Kemp is an associate research scholar with the Program on Science and Global Security at the Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Before this, he was science advisor in the Office […]

I just watched a fascinating video from Reuters TV about a tiny town in Afghanistan named “Little America.”  Located in the Helmand Province in Southern Afghanistan, “Little America” was the largest development project in Afghanistan’s history.  First populated by Americans during the Cold War, it was developed to counteract Soviet influence in the region.  The US spent hundreds […]

  At risk of tooting the horn for my former employer, IEEE Spectrum magazine, I want to commend my former colleagues and fellow bloggers for sharply raising the question of whether the U.S. government considered the global consequences when it decided to unleash Stuxnet and, most likely, Flame as well. In a Monday post, Robert […]

The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) has released a report on food, agriculture, and sustainability ahead of the Rio+20 Earth Summit. Although “Food and Agriculture: The Future of Sustainability” focuses primarily on environmental issues, it draws attention to the health implications related to the current global food system. More than one […]

In my last blog, I ended with a quote from a 2011 Foreign Affairs magazine article written by former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense William J. Lynn III.  In the article he stated the Department of Defense has a five pillar strategy for operating in cyberspace: “…treating cyberspace as an operational domain, like land, air, […]