10th Annual Postdoctoral Science Symposium, University Of Texas Md Anderson Cancer Center Postdoctoral Association

Annual Postdoctoral Science Symposium Abstracts

The Annual Postdoctoral Science Symposium (APSS) was initiated on August 4, 2011, by the MD Anderson Postdoctoral Association to provide a platform for talented postdoctoral fellows throughout the Texas Medical Center to present their work to a wider audience.

APSS is a scientific symposium organized by postdoctoral fellows from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center that welcomes submissions and presentations from postdoctoral fellows from all Texas Medical Center affiliated institutions and other Houston area institutions. The APSS provides a professional venue for postdoctoral scientists to develop, clarify and refine their research as result of formal reviews and critiques …

Mail-Voting During Covid-19: Protecting Public Health And Expanding Voting Accessibility, Emily Kawahara

Center for Health Law Policy and Bioethics

The 2020 presidential election will be held during the COVID-19 public health crisis. In response to the COVID-19 situation, there is an immediate need to universalize mail-voting. However, President Donald Trump consistently downplays COVID-19 and asserts that mail- voting causes voter fraud and favors the Democratic Party. This Article examines modifications made in prior elections held during or in the wake of crises. Though these modifications are not applicable for the COVID-19 pandemic, they provide two important distinctions: crisis-specific measures should prioritize protecting public health and, if there is an opportunity to preserve the right to vote through election modification, …

Immigrants And Interdependence: How The Covid-19 Pandemic Exposes The Folly Of The New Public Charge Rule, Medha D. Makhlouf, Jasmine Sandhu

Faculty Scholarly Works

On February 24, 2020, just as the Trump administration began taking significant action to prepare for an outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States, it also began implementing its new public charge rule. Public charge is an immigration law that restricts the admission of certain noncitizens based on the likelihood that they will become dependent on the government for support. The major effect of the new rule is to chill noncitizens from enrolling in public benefits, including Medicaid, out of fear of negative immigration consequences. These chilling effects have persisted during the pandemic. When noncitizens are afraid to (1) seek …

Critical Analysis Of The Value Of Drought Information And Impacts On Land Management And Public Health, Tingting Liu, Kelly Helm Smith, Richard Krop, Tonya Haigh, Mark Svoboda

National Drought Mitigation Center: Faculty Publications

This paper reviews previous efforts to assign monetary value to climatic or meteorological information, such as public information on drought, climate, early warning systems, and weather forecast information. Methods and tools that have been explored to examine the benefits of climatic and meteorological information include the avoided cost, contingent valuation, choice experiments, benefit transfer, and descriptive approaches using surveys. The second part of this paper discusses specific considerations related to valuing drought information for public health and the Bureau of Land Management. We found a multitude of connections between drought and the land management and health sectors in the literature. …

Toward A Symbiotic Perspective On Public Health: Recognizing The Ambivalence Of Microbes In The Anthropocene, S. Sariola, Scott F. Gilbert

Biology Faculty Works

Microbes evolve in complex environments that are often fashioned, in part, by human desires. In a global perspective, public health has played major roles in structuring how microbes are perceived, cultivated, and destroyed. The germ theory of disease cast microbes as enemies of the body and the body politic. Antibiotics have altered microbial development by providing stringent natural selection on bacterial species, and this has led to the formation of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains. Public health perspectives such as “Precision Public Health” and “One Health” have recently been proposed to further manage microbial populations. However, neither of these take into account …

Protecting Public Health, Susan H. Davide, Christine Macarelli, Anty Lam

Publications and Research

In light of declining vaccination rates, oral health professionals need to be knowledgeable about current vaccine recommendations so they can best advise their patients and support public health.

Developing An Indicator System For A Healthy City: Taking An Urban Area As A Pilot, Tingting Li, Yong Fang, Dewei Zeng, Zumin Shi, Manoj Sharma, Huan Zeng, Yong Zhao

Walden Faculty and Staff Publications

Purpose: The Healthy Cities Project is an important strategy for global health. This study aimed to develop a scientific and appropriate indicator system for the evaluation of a Healthy City in Chongqing, China. Methods: Data were collected via a review of government documents, focus group discussions, and in-depth interviews. A total of 34 government documents were reviewed to build the indicator database based on our previous studies. The first round of focus group discussions, which involved eight health-related experts, was conducted to form the indicator system framework. In-depth interviews with 15 experts from government departments were conducted to design …

Covid-19 And Public Transportation: Current Assessment, Prospects, And Research Needs, Alejandro Tirachini, Oded Cats

Journal of Public Transportation

The COVID-19 pandemic poses a great challenge for contemporary public transportation worldwide, resulting from an unprecedented decline in demand and revenue. In this paper, we synthesize the state-of-the-art, up to early June 2020, on key developments regarding public transportation and the COVID-19 pandemic, including the different responses adopted by governments and public transportation agencies around the world, and the research needs pertaining to critical issues that minimize contagion risk in public transportation in the so-called post-lockdown phase. While attempts at adherence to physical distancing (which challenges the very concept of mass public transportation) are looming in several countries, the latest …

From A 'Super Spreader Of Mers' To A 'Super Stopper' Of Covid-19: Explaining The Evolution Of South Korea's Effective Crisis Management System, Seung-Youn Oh

Political Science Faculty Research and Scholarship

COVID-19 has placed global and national leadership under a serious stress test by threatening lives and livelihoods on an unprecedented scale. South Korea emerged as one of the first countries to flatten the transmission curve despite its high population density and proximity to China, without imposing the aggressive lockdowns or complete travel bans that China and many other countries adopted. This paper explores two questions. First, what kind of institutional and legal foundations explain South Korea’s strong public health response to the pandemic? Second, from a historical perspective, South Korea evaded the worst of the SARS outbreak in 2003 yet …

Covid-19 And Prisoners’ Rights, Gregory Bernstein, Stephanie Guzman, Maggie Hadley, Rosalyn M. Huff, Alison Hung, Anita N.H. Yandle, Alexis Hoag, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

As COVID-19 continues to spread rapidly across the country, the crowded and unsanitary conditions in prisons, jails, juvenile detention, and immigration detention centers leave incarcerated individuals especially vulnerable. This chapter will discuss potential avenues for detained persons and their lawyers seeking to use the legal system to obtain relief, including potential release, during this extraordinary, unprecedented crisis.

Legal Lessons From A Very Fast Problem: Covid-19, Eric E. Johnson, Theodore Bailey

Faculty Articles

The course of a pandemic is as much a function of social structures as protein structures. Law is among the most important of these social structures, and it is among those most capable of the kind of rapid adaptation that is needed against an exponentially replicating virus. Thus, there is an urgent need to scrutinize the role of the law in impeding or supporting timely and effective measures to combat the great pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and its associated malady, coronavirus disease 2019, better known as COVID-19. This Essay offers a look back on …

Why Am I Wearing A Mask If I Don't Feel Sick?, Lily-Anna James, Diana Koval, Samuel Latzsch, Chelsea Nowakowski

Foundations of Public Health - Infographics

No abstract provided.

Alcohol Consumption And Alcohol Policy, Mustafa Necmi̇ İlhan, Di̇lek Yapar

Turkish Journal of Medical Sciences

Alcohol is a unique addictive substance used by many people for different reasons. Alcohol use affects not only the users but also the family and the whole society in a negative way. Alcohol is one of the most commonly used substances for entertainment purposes in the world and 1 in 3 people is a current drinker. 2348 billion people (43% of the population) aged 15 and over are current drinkers and males drink about 2 times more frequently than females (53.6%/32.3%). According to the Global Alcohol and Health Report published by the World Health Organization (WHO) (2018), total alcohol per …

The Personal Responsibility Pandemic: Centering Solidarity In Public Health And Employment Law, Lindsay F. Wiley, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Articles

Our nation’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has revealed fundamental flaws in our legal regimes governing both public health and employment. Public health orders have called on individuals to make sacrifices to protect society as a whole. Simple fairness dictates that the burdens should be shared as widely as the benefits. And the case for burden-sharing does not rest on fairness alone. Public health measures are more likely to succeed when those who are subject to them understand them as fair1 and when their cooperation is supported. 2 Predictably, our pandemic response has placed disproportionate burdens on those who are …

Public Health Law Tools: A Brief Guide, Kristen Underhill

Faculty Scholarship

The COVID-19 pandemic offers a threat with few precedents in modern times and tests the tools of modern surveillance and public health law. The goal of this chapter is to provide a brief overview of the types of measures that state and federal governments can invoke to treat and prevent the spread of infectious disease. The following sections will provide an orientation to domestic public health law followed by the types of measures available to state and federal public health authorities.

Although this chapter does not consider international institutions, treaties, or norms that affect public health, these are also essential …

Linked Fate: Justice And The Criminal Legal System During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Susan P. Sturm, Faiz Pirani, Hyun Kim, Natalie Behr, Zachary D. Hardwick

Faculty Scholarship

The concept of “linked fate” has taken on new meaning in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. People all over the world – from every walk of life, spanning class, race, gender, and nationality – face a potentially deadly threat requiring cooperation and sacrifice. The plight of the most vulnerable among us affects the capacity of the larger community to cope with, recover, and learn from COVID-19’s devastating impact. COVID-19 makes visible and urgent the need to embrace our linked fate, “develop a sense of commonality and shared circumstances,” and unstick dysfunctional and inequitable political and legal systems.

Nowhere is …

Ailing In Place: Environmental Inequities And Health Disparities In Appalachia, Michele Morrone

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

In Ailing in Place, Michele Morrone explores the relationship between environmental conditions in Appalachia and health outcomes that are too often ascribed to individual choices only. She applies quantitative data to observations from environmental health professionals to frame the ways in which the environment, as a social determinant of health, leads to health disparities in Appalachian communities. These examples—these stories of place—trace the impacts of water quality, waste disposal, and natural resource extraction on the health and quality of life of Appalachian people.

Public health is inextricably linked to place. Environmental conditions such as contaminated water, unsafe food, and polluted …

High Tech, High Risk: Tech Ethics Lessons For The Covid-19 Pandemic Response, Emanuel Moss, Jacob Metcalf

Publications and Research

The COVID-19 pandemic has, in a matter of a few short months, drastically reshaped society around the world. Because of the growing perception of machine learning as a technology capable of addressing large problems at scale, machine learning applications have been seen as desirable interventions in mitigating the risks of the pandemic disease. However, machine learning, like many tools of technocratic governance, is deeply implicated in the social production and distribution of risk and the role of machine learning in the production of risk must be considered as engineers and other technologists develop tools for the current crisis. This paper …

The Problem With Relying On Profit-Driven Models To Produce Pandemic Drugs, Ana Santos Rutschman

All Faculty Scholarship

The longstanding problems of relying on a market response to a pandemic are becoming readily apparent in the United States, which has quickly become the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak. The problems are particularly pronounced in pharmaceutical markets, where we are pinning our hopes for both cures and vaccines. In previous work we have shown how characteristics of healthcare markets in the United States create a divergence between the private incentives of for-profit companies and public health needs, leading to sub-optimal health outcomes in what is a uniquely market-driven healthcare system. In this Essay, written as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, …

Reviving Focused Scrutiny In The Constitutional Review Of Public Health Measures, Robert Gatter

All Faculty Scholarship

This article re-examines the "focused scrutiny" standard proposed by Prof. Scott Burris in 1989 and argues for its application particularly during an infectious disease emergency such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Focused scrutiny seeks to tie judicial review of the constitutionality of public health measures closely to the facts of the particular disease and to evidence of the efficacy of each governmental action to prevent the spread of that disease, even when courts adopt rational basis testing.

Protecting The Rights Of People With Disabilities, Elizabeth Pendo

All Faculty Scholarship

One in four Americans — a diverse group of 61 million people — experience some form of disability (Okoro, 2018). On average, people with disabilities experience significant disparities in education, employment, poverty, access to health care, food security, housing, transportation, and exposure to crime and domestic violence (Pendo & Iezzoni, 2019). Intersections with demographic characteristics such as race, ethnicity, gender, and LGBT status, may intensify certain inequities. For example, women with disability experience greater disparities in income, education, and employment (Nosek, 2016), and members of under-served racial and ethnic groups with disabilities experience greater disparities in health status and access …

Design Of An Enhanced Public Health Surveillance System For Hepatitis C Virus Elimination In King County, Washington, Atar Baer, Meaghan S. Fagalde, Curtis D. Drake, Elisabeth H. Sohlberg, Elizabeth Barash, Sara Glick, Alexander J. Millman, Jeffrey S. Duchin

Project ECHO Bibliography

Introduction:

With the goal of eliminating hepatitis C virus (HCV) as a public health problem in Washington State, Public Health–Seattle & King County (PHSKC) designed a Hepatitis C Virus Test and Cure (HCV-TAC) data system to integrate surveillance, clinical, and laboratory data into a comprehensive database. The intent of the system was to promote identification, treatment, and cure of HCV-infected persons (ie, HCV care cascade) using a population health approach.

Materials and Methods:

The data system automatically integrated case reports received via telephone and fax from health care providers and laboratories, hepatitis test results reported via electronic laboratory reporting, and …

Vaxinsight: An Artificial Intelligence System To Access Large-Scale Public Perceptions Of Vaccination From Social Media, Jingcheng Du

Dissertations and Theses (Open Access)

Vaccination is considered one of the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century. A high vaccination rate is required to reduce the prevalence and incidence of vaccine-preventable diseases. However, in the last two decades, there has been a significant and increasing number of people who refuse or delay getting vaccinated and who prohibit their children from receiving vaccinations. Importantly, under-vaccination is associated with infectious disease outbreaks. A good understanding of public perceptions regarding vaccinations is important if we are to develop effective vaccination promotion strategies. Traditional methods of research, such as surveys, suffer limitations that impede our understanding of …

A Shift In Global Thought And Practice: Assessing The Impacts Of The Human Security Paradigm On Global Public Health, Elizabeth Livingston Leone

Honors College Theses

With the increasing emphasis on health through human security since the 1990s by the United Nations, scholars have debated how human security has influenced public health. I examine how the idea of human security has become a paradigm and if this paradigm has adopted in public health programs. I argue that the rise of human security has led to an emphasis on the role of global actors, preventative care and health education when states adopt the paradigm. This adoption should in turn improve public health in Ghana and the Ivory Coast.

Jcph Presentations At The American Public Health Association Annual Conference 2019

JCPH at APHA 2019

No abstract provided.

Evaluating The Effect Of Temperature On A Human Parasite And Its Intermediate Snail Host: Implications For A Changing Climate, Karena H. Nguyen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Global climate change is impacting the emergence, re-emergence, prevalence, and incidence of infectious diseases worldwide, including parasitic diseases of humans (Blum and Hotez 2018). Neglected tropical diseases, defined as a group of parasitic diseases affecting developing countries in the tropics (Hotez et al. 2007), are of particular concern because these diseases occur in areas that are also expected to experience rapid population growth and agricultural development in the coming decades. As human population and food demand increase, the greater the likelihood of humans encountering intermediate hosts that either inhabit agricultural areas or are impacted by agricultural development, which will influence …

Mapping 123 Million Neonatal, Infant And Child Deaths Between 2000 And 2017, Roy Burstein, Simon I. Hay, Veincent Christian F. Pepito, 556 Co-Authors

Ateneo School of Medicine and Public Health Publications

Since 2000, many countries have achieved considerable success in improving child survival, but localized progress remains unclear. To inform efforts towards United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3.2—to end preventable child deaths by 2030—we need consistently estimated data at the subnational level regarding child mortality rates and trends. Here we quantified, for the period 2000–2017, the subnational variation in mortality rates and number of deaths of neonates, infants and children under 5 years of age within 99 low- and middle-income countries using a geostatistical survival model. We estimated that 32% of children under 5 in these countries lived in districts that …

Hspm 7135-A: Public Health Policy Development & Evaluation, Ho-Jui Tung

College of Public Health: Faculty Syllabi (2014-2021)

This course introduces students to health policy development, analysis and management by examining issues in the health sector. It fosters an appreciation of the complexity of policy problems and provides the basic tools used in public health policy design, implementation and evaluation.

Epid 7135-A – Epidemiology Of Infectious Disease, (Isaac) Chun Hai Fung

College of Public Health: Faculty Syllabi (2014-2021)

This course is designed to provide students with an overview of the principles and practices of infectious diseases epidemiology with focus on how the presence and control of communicable diseases affects public health locally, nationally and internationally. Topics to be covered include: 1) general principles of infectious diseases epidemiology, including outbreak investigation, surveillance, analysis of infectious diseases data, and laboratory testing of specimens; 2) major modes of infectious disease transmission, including airborne, food and water, zoonotic, insect vector, blood, and sexual transmission; 3) different control strategies for infectious diseases, including infection control, antimicrobial management, immunization, risk factor modification, and screening; …

Epid 9132 – Epidemiology Of Infectious Diseases Transmitted Via Bodily Fluids (Aka “Infectious Disease 2” Listed In Folio), (Isaac) Chun Hai Fung

College of Public Health: Faculty Syllabi (2014-2021)

This course covers advanced topics in epidemiology of infectious diseases transmitted via bodily fluids, primarily sexually transmitted infections and bloodborne infections. Important themes may include outbreak preparedness and response, surveillance, and interventions that prevent and control transmissions. Computational, mathematical and statistical tools relevant to the practice of infectious disease epidemiology will be introduced.