Public Health in Print: 2015 Columbia Public Health Magazine Arrives

In recent presidential debates, candidates squared off on topics from vaccination and women’s health to gun control and climate change—issues firmly in the purview of public health. In the cover story (“Running on Prevention”) of the 2015 edition of Columbia Public Health magazine, out today, Mailman School scholars make the case for a prevention platform, campaigning for a holistic view of our health that goes beyond doctors and disease to account for factors such as walkable neighborhoods, clean air, and economic security.

As the magazine shows, recognition of the relevance of public health is not limited to the United States. In “Climate Changing,” read how the Mailman School is making inroads in China as the country embraces public health solutions to issues from air pollution and global warming to a rapidly urbanizing and aging population.

From cover to cover, the publication's stories provide an in-depth look at faculty research. “It Takes Guts” tells the story of researchers at the Center for Infection and Immunity who, after establishing the lack of any link between autism and the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, went on to identify intriguing clues about the origins of the disorder within microbial ecosystem in the intestinal track. “The Law of Epidemics” details research to understand the sharp rise of heroin use in the United States and strategies to prevent it. “Toxic Exposure” examines urban poverty and its far-reaching effects on health, and efforts like Mailman’s School Health Program to support childhood development.

Readers will get to know recent grads Jason Friesen, MPH ’12, founder of Trek Medics International, an Uber-style system to improve emergency medical response in disaster zones, and Carlos Cuevas, MPH ’12, senior adviser to New York’s Medicaid director, who is helping oversee a redesign of the program; as well as new faculty like Gina Wingood, director of the newly created Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion, and faculty mainstays like Bruce Levin, professor of Biostatistics, who weighs in on the ethics of clinical trial design for the recent Ebola outbreak.

Taken as a whole, Columbia Public Health is proof of the astonishing breadth and relevancy of public health thinking—a fact that increasing numbers of decision-makers in all sectors are beginning to embrace. As Assistant Professor of Sociomedical Sciences Mark Hatzenbuehler puts it in the magazine, “every policy we pass is a health policy.”

Read the magazine online or pick up a print copy in the Allan Rosenfield Building lobby.