The One Wealth Approach

I’ll be speaking on Structural One Health at the University of Minnesota this Wednesday, April 16, as part of the Institute on the Environment’s ‘Frontiers in the Environment’ speakers series.

If you are unable to make the talk in the flesh, you can watch it live online here.

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Global Capital and Disease Hot Spots

Rob Wallace, Visiting Scholar, Institute for Global Studies, University of Minnesota

Wednesday, April 16, 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m.
IonE Seminar Room R380, Learning & Environmental Sciences Bldg., St. Paul campus, University of Minnesota

Beware the Blob

For World AIDS Day 2012 I post an edited excerpt of a speech I gave a decade ago to the Second Scholarly Conference on Women and Work: Health and Wellness held at the Center for Worker Education in New York City. I ask whether HIV can search for the most vulnerable populations.

Identifying trends in health and disease doesn’t mean we know how these patterns came about.

Why, for instance, is HIV/AIDS so prevalent in Africa? It’s where the virus first emerged, of course. Cases have had more time there to accumulate. But at 22 million HIV cases, initial conditions are hardly explanation enough. An array of interacting socioeconomic circumstances and cultural happenstance locks millions of people to precarious fates (and, in this case, greater risk of infection). Many of Africa’s countries are the poorest in the world and the workaday people live in are channeled in such a way that the term ‘choice’, at the heart of much public health commentary, loses its connotation of free will.

How Mayor Bloomberg Causes Obesity

Yeah the doctors don’t know, but New York was killing me / Bunch of doctors coming round, they don’t know / That New York is killing me / Yeah I need to go home and take it slow in Jackson, Tennessee -Gil Scott-Heron (2010)

On October 6 Mayor Michael Bloomberg asked the United States Department of Agriculture for permission to enjoin New York City’s 1.7 million food stamp recipients from using their stamps to buy sodas and other sugary drinks.

The request, made with New York State’s assistance, is part of a anti-obesity campaign pursued by the Bloomberg administration that has already included advertisements, greater restrictions on food sold in public schools, and an unsuccessful go at imposing a tax on the sugar drinks.