Boston College Law School’s Lex Latinx webinar series is a series of five online conferences in Spanish with simultaneous translation to English, with speakers from different Latin American Universities and BC Law Faculty discussing human rights protection during the pandemic as well as perspectives for the post-pandemic.
Students will likely be flocking to public health courses and programs in upcoming semesters. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has piqued the interest of many in society, among them college students. Students who have an interest in health, medicine, or science now may see public health as a viable career option, especially with numerous public health researchers being featured in stories and social media around the globe. Although this is an important moment for our field and discipline, universities training future public health professionals will need to recalibrate how they approach their teaching in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
COVID-19 lockdowns are resulting in a reduction of background noise recorded at many seismic stations: We’re seeing quieter seismic stations around the world, including at BC campus and at Weston Observatory.
“Climate change and air pollution are major threats to human health and economic development that must be addressed. The COVID pandemic has raised the stakes considerably,” says report co-author and Professor of Biology Phil Landrigan, M.D., director of the Schiller Institute’s Global Observatory on Pollution and Health. “It is essential to understand the extent to which these issues can be tackled together. Policymakers can use this report to prioritize investments that are the most effective in generating co-benefits across health and climate.” —from BC News
A few years after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez published his novel Love in the Time of Cholera.[1] Years earlier, the Swedish doctor Axel Munthe, who came to Naples in 1884 to treat the victims of a cholera epidemic, wrote his Letters From A Mourning City.[2] In both cases, an epidemic caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae is the background for deeply human stories (imaginary in Márquez’s novel and real in Munthe’s letters). Márquez and Munthe invite us to contemplate how it is possible to live “in the time” of an epidemic, as involuntary witnesses of human suffering, eager to help the most needy and aware of the risks of contagion.
Course Description: Although we are increasingly aware that our habits of consumption affect the environment, it is hard to imagine that consuming patterns are capable of being changed. In this class, students will learn that practices of consumption are both socially and historically constructed, that they change dramatically over time, and that there are (and always have been) urgent moral issues connected to practices of consumption. We will explore the global, social, and environmental dimensions of consumption, studying things like the 1897 Sears catalog, 1950s television shows, Canada Goose jackets, DIY manuals and makerspaces, and hippy cookbooks of the 1960s.
Alejandro Olayao-Méndez, SJ contributed to a 9 July 2020 blog post on bmj.com. >>>
On 20 March 2020, the Trump administration announced that it would be limiting nonessential travel across US land borders [1]. Citing the threat of covid-19, the processing of asylum seekers or those who enter the US without appropriate documentation or authorization would, without delay or legal process, be deported [2]. These policy changes, and subsequent others, have created an acute-on-chronic health crisis amongst asylum seekers and migrants on Mexico’s northern border [3].
Consistent with previously unsubstantiated claims that asylum seekers pose a public health threat to the US, the United States government purported that these policies were needed to safeguard Americans from covid-19 [4,5]. Yet at the time of the announcement, there were over 17,000 confirmed cases of covid-19 in the US, compared to only 164 cases in Mexico, and 37 cases reported in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras combined [6,7].
Diamond, M., Novak, C., Testa, L., Olayao-Méndez, A. (2020, July 9). Cross-border implications of the US response to covid-19: an escalating health crisis on Mexico’s northern border. TheBJMOpinion. <https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/07/09/cross-border-implications-of-the-us-response-to-covid-19-an-escalating-health-crisis-on-mexicos-northern-border/>
As the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic evolves, questions regarding the fair allocation of scarce medical resources, such as ventilators, antiviral drugs, and vaccines, abound. Piscitello et al1 provide a valuable summary of US state ventilator allocation guidelines during public health emergencies. Even if guidelines for ventilators have not been widely implemented during the current pandemic, the principles they articulate are an important statement of social values. The variation among guidelines that Piscitello et al1 uncovered suggests that there is no consensus on the adequate balance between different ethical considerations.
Pathak PA, Sönmez T, Ünver MU. Improving Ventilator Rationing Through Collaboration With Experts on Resource Allocation. JAMA Netw Open. 2020;3(6):e2012838. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.12838
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused more than 9 million infections and a half million deaths. It has caused disease in every country. Like all pandemics, it has laid bare and exploited social inequalities and caused disproportionate damage to the poor and the weak, minorities and the marginalized.
