We Live in Each Other’s Shadow: Social Distancing is Our Social Responsibility

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As you may know, a new coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2 has been spreading, causing a disease that epidemiologists have named COVID-19. The disease is new (so the majority of people aren’t immune), spreads easily from person-to-person, and can cause severe illness in the elderly and medically fragile. The spread of the disease to so many people in so many places has led the World Health Organisation to declare the spread COVID-19 a pandemic.

The situation is very, very serious, but there are lots of steps you can be taking to keep yourself healthy. At this stage, Public Health is also needing us to keep our communities healthy through actions we call “social distancing.”

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MNÁwesome: What Happens When We Legalise Abortion?

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If you follow me (or probably any other Irish person) (or read Irish news) (or are passingly aware of when Ireland makes foreign headlines), you probably heard that the Republic of Ireland voted last month to repeal the 8th Amendment of the Irish Constitution (Bunreacht na hÉireann). It was a massive, multiyear campaign that took off running after the tragic—and completely preventable—death of Irish dentist Savita Halappanavar.

I know that this topic is hard for many people and that there are a lot of very strong emotions. As a devout Roman Catholic, I’m familiar with both sides of the issue. I’m not going to dig into the intricacies of the philosophy on when life begins, but I will say this: I desperately wish that I lived in a world without abortion. I wish that I lived in a world in which every pregnancy was planned and healthy and no one ever had to make the decision whether to terminate their pregnancy. I wish I lived in that world, but it doesn’t exist. It is not my place to tell someone else what they need to do with their body and in no other instance do we insist that it is.

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Medicines and Vaccines Part 2: Bringing Essential Medicines to Market

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In our last piece, we talked about the pharmaceutical development pipeline and how some drugs are repurposed from other medicines, rather than being discovered as a new medicine completely. In this post I’ll talk about what that pipeline looks like for antibiotics and vaccines, two of the most important types of medicines that we have. 

Vaccines and antibiotics, like all medications, are very expensive to produce (as we discussed in Part 1), but they can’t be sold for the same high prices as nonessential (think Viagra) medications. This creates a problem for the development pipeline: how can companies afford to take risks on new development for products that won’t cover the cost of producing them? The answer was surprising for me when I first started studying public health. 

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Medicines and Vaccines Part 1: The Pharmaceutical Pipeline

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I often hear people express concern that pharmaceutical companies (Big Pharma) are making a killing on medications and vaccines and fear that we can’t trust them because of it. I also feel a lot of discomfort with pharmaceutical companies skyrocketing the prices for products like daraprim and epi pens. Drugs are really, really, really expensive to make and somebody has to foot the cost for developing them, but we also have people dying because they can’t afford the basic medications they need to live. There has to be a better way, but it’s hard to know what to think when the process is so mysterious. This piece is the first in a 3 part series on how medicines and vaccines are made and what they do. We won’t be able to cover every aspect of it because 1. that’s the stuff of dissertations and 2. I honestly don’t know all of it, but we’ll go through an overview of how the very basics.

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Health: More than Healthcare

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Exploring the ways that our social connections, the community we live in, and economics influence our health

When we think of our health, our first thought is usually of going to see a physician (or other medical provider) and having tests like an MRI done, but access to medical care only makes up a small proportion of our overall health. Our health is shaped much more by the social determinants around us–the air we breathe; the water we drink; the amount of education we have; the safety and accessibility of our housing, nutrition, and public transportation. Together those factors build a framework that we call “The Social Determinants of Health.”

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