Abstract:
The peoples of Burma/Myanmar have faced military rule, human rights violations, and poor health outcomes for decades. The country Is now undergoing a political liberalization, and multiple changes in political, social and economic life. The human rights and health situation of the country's many ethnic nationalities remain challenging, and represent one of the clearest threats to the prospect of successful transition to peace, and to democracy. We will explore the current health and human rights situation in the country, the ongoing threats to peace, and ways forward for this least developed nation as it emerges from 5 decades of military rule.

Chris Beyrer MD, MPH, is a professor of Epidemiology, International Health, and Health, Behavior, and Society at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is the founding Director of the University¹s Center for Public Health and Human Rights, which seeks to bring the tools of population-based sciences to bear on Health and rights threats. Dr. Beyrer also serves as Associate Director of the Johns Hopkins Centers for AIDS Research (CFAR) and of the Center for Global Health. He has been involved in health and human rights work with Burmese populations since 1993. Prof. Beyrer is the author of more than 200 scientific papers, and author or editor of six books, including War in the Blood: Sex, Politics and AIDS in Southeast Asia, and Public Health and Human Rights: Evidence-Based Approaches. He has served as a consultant and adviser to numerous national and international institutions, including the National Institutes of Health, the World Bank, WHO, UNAIDS, the Open Society Foundations, the Walter Reed Army Institute for Research, amfAR The Foundation for AIDS Research, Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch. Dr. Beyrer received a BA in History from Hobart and Wm. Smith Colleges, his MD from SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn, NY, and completed his residency in Preventive Medicine, public health training, an MPH and a Infectious Diseases Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He received an honorary Doctorate (PhD) in Health Sciences from Chiang Mai University in Thailand, in 2012, in recognition of his 20 years of public health service in Thailand

Abstract:

Nipah virus lives in large fruit bats in South and Southeast Asia. When people become infected with Nipah virus over half of them die. Nipah virus can also be transmitted from person to person. This talk will describe how this bat virus occasionally infects human populations and causes outbreaks through person-to-person transmission. It will explore the risk of a global pandemic of Nipah virus and consider appropriate policy responses.

Speaker bio:

Stephen Luby is Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine; Deputy Director for Research at the Center for Global Health Innovation; Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.

Dr. Luby studied philosophy and earned a Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude from Creighton University. Dr. Luby earned his medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas and completed his residency in internal medicine at the University of Rochester-Strong Memorial Hospital. He studied epidemiology and preventive medicine at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Luby's former positions include leading the Epidemiology Unit of the Community Health Sciences Department at the Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan for 5 years and working as a Medical Epidemiologist in the Foodborne and Diarrheal Diseases Branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exploring causes and prevention of diarrheal disease in settings where diarrhea is a leading cause of childhood death.  Immediately prior to his current appointment, Dr. Luby served for eight years at the International Centre for Diarrheal Diseases Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B), where he directed the Centre for Communicable Diseases. Dr. Luby was seconded from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and was the Country Director for CDC in Bangladesh.

Dr. Luby's research has focused on clarifying the burden of several communicable diseases in low income countries and developing and evaluating practical strategies to mitigate their impact. He is currently exploring circumstances where economic and political forces encourage environmental degradation that exerts substantial disease burden in low income countries, with a view to developing and evaluating interventions.

A tremendous amount of radioactive products were discharged as a result of the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in March 2011, which resulted in radioactive contamination of the plant and surrounding areas. While geographical distribution of radioactive iodine, tellurium, and cesium in the surface soils was smoothly (but not always systematically) widespread all over the region, health risk information by the government, media, and other organizations is most likely to be given in terms of administrative boundaries (cf. prefectures, municipalities, etc.) and/or distance from the radiation source.

This paper estimates the effect of such health risk information rather than the actual health risks of radiation on land and other prices in different locations. We find that the prefecture and municipality border effects – but not the distance effect from the nuclear power plant – are significantly related to a reduction in land and other prices after the accident. This shows that people responded to health risk information based on administrative boundaries rather than the actual health risk of radiation after the disaster. Although health risk information based on prefecture and municipality boundaries has an obvious advantage of distilling large and complex risk information into a simple one, the government, media, and other organizations need to recognize and carefully examine the potential of misclassifying non-contaminated areas into contaminated prefectures. Doing so will avoid unintentional consequences to the region’s economy.

Hiroaki Matsuura is currently Departmental Lecturer in the Economy of Japan in the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, University of Oxford and a Junior Research Fellow of St. Antony’s College. His main interests are health economics and demography, with a special interest in the relation between laws and population health. Hiroaki received his B.A. in Economics from Keio University, M.A. in Social Science from the University of Chicago, M.S. in Project Management from Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Sc.D. in Global Health and Population (Economics track) from Harvard University’s School of Public Health. In the past, he was affiliated with Institute of Quantitative Social Sciences, Human Rights in Development, and Takemi Program in International Health at Harvard University. He also worked as a research assistant at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His doctoral dissertation research explores a right to health or to health care in national constitutions of 157 countries and state constitutions of the 50 U.S. states and estimates the impact of introducing (or removing) a right to health or to health care into national and state constitutions on health system and population health outcomes. His most recent article, “The Right to Health in Japan: Challenges of a Super Aging Society and Implication from Its 2011 Public Health Emergency” (with Eriko Sase) will be appeared on “Advancing the Human Right to Health”, edited by José M. Zuniga, Stephen P. Marks, and Lawrence O. Gostin, Oxford University Press, 2013. 

Lina Khatib is the co-founding Head of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She joined Stanford University in 2010 from the University of London where she was an Associate Professor. Her research is firmly interdisciplinary and focuses on the intersections of politics, media, and social factors in relation to the politics of the Middle East. She is also a consultant on Middle East politics and media and has published widely on topics such as new media and Islamism, US public diplomacy towards the Middle East, and political media and conflict in the Arab world, as well as on the political dynamics in Lebanon and Iran. She has an active interest in the link between track two dialogue and democratization policy. She is also a Research Associate at SOAS, University of London, and, from 2010-2012, was a Research Fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.

Lina is one of the core authors of the forthcoming Arab Human Development Report (2013) published by the UNDP, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Syria Justice and Accountability Center. She is also a founding co-editor of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, a multidisciplinary journal concerned with politics, culture and communication in the region, and in 2009 co-edited (with Klaus Dodds) a special issue of the journal on geopolitics, public diplomacy and soft power in the Middle East. She edited the Journal of Media Practice from 2007-2010.

Paul Wise is the Richard E. Behrman Professor of Child Health and Society, Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine, and Senior Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.  He is Director of the Center for Policy, Outcomes and Prevention and a core faculty of the Centers for Health Policy and Primary Care Outcomes Research, at Stanford University.

Dr. Wise received his A.B. degree summa cum laude and his M.D. degree from Cornell University, a Master of Public Health degree from the Harvard School of Public Health and did his pediatric training at the Children's Hospital in Boston.  His former positions include serving as the Director of Emergency and Primary Care Services at the Children's Hospital, Boston, Director of the Harvard Institute for Reproductive and Child Health at Harvard Medical School, and Special Assistant to the U.S. Surgeon General.  Prior to moving to Stanford University, Dr. Wise was Vice-Chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities in the Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, the academic and research base of Partners in Health.

Rajaie Batniji is a resident physician in internal medicine at Stanford and a CDDRL affiliate. His research examines the selection of priority diseases and countries in global health, and he is interested in global health financing and the priority-setting process of international institutions. His work has also examined social determinants of health in the Middle East. At FSI, Dr. Batniji is co-investigator on Global Underdevelopment Action Fund projects explaining U.S. global health financing and political causes of public health crisis.

Dr. Batniji received his doctorate in international relations (D.Phil) from Oxford University where he studied as a Marshall Scholar. He also earned a M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine and M.A. and B.A. (with distinction) degrees in History from Stanford University. Dr. Batniji was previously based at Oxford's Global Economic Governance Program, and he has worked as a consultant to the World Health Organization.