Is it acceptable for mothers to die of preventable causes during pregnancy because they are poor? Sadly, this is the pattern revealed by the United Nations (UN) statistics which show that dying of preventable causes is still a reality for half a million women every year [1]. These women live in the world’s poorest countries and surprisingly, the numbers of preventable maternal deaths in these regions have not improved significantly over the last decade [1,2,3]. But the picture is much different for women in developed nations where maternal deaths are 400 times less frequent [2]. Addressing these inequalities should be…

We utilize it for washing and waste disposal, employ it for transportation, power generation and irrigation, use it for cooking and after all need it to live – water. Although it is essential for all life on our planet, we often forget that freshwater resources are limited and in short supply in many regions of the world. The world population, currently estimated at 6.8 billion, lives on only 1% of the of the earth’s water with the remainder being either salt water or tied up in snow and ice. Population growth puts stress on our planet’s freshwater resources, as more…

(If you want to leave a comment about the talk, please do so here). – – – Topic: Dr. Jennifer Gardy, an alumnus speaker at the event, is co-leading the new genome research lab at the BC Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC). She is also known as Nerd Girl from her Globe and Mail blog of the same name. In her talk, Gardy shared how advances in technology have provided increased collaboration on scientific research and scholarly publications — what she labelled as public health 2.0. For example, she showed how one publication had 36 authors. After leading the audience…

Bananas are just a fruit, how are they considered a global issue? Although bananas may only look like a fruit, they represent a wide variety of environmental, economic, social, and political problems. The banana trade symbolizes economic imperialism, injustices in the global trade market, and the globalization of the agricultural economy [1]. Bananas are also number four on the list of staple crops in the world and one of the biggest profit makers in supermarkets, making them critical for economic and global food security [2]. As one of the first tropical fruits to be exported, bananas were a cheap way…

Aging and death are prominent sources of concern for individuals of North America (Neimeyer 2004). It is not surprising that longevity and immortality have pervaded almost every culture at some point in time. The ancient Egyptians believed that preserving the body of the deceased would lead to preservation of the physical form in an after-life. More recently, the arts of western culture have addressed the cost of immortality in a fantastical fashion, for example, in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. The signs of normal aging, especially through the later decades of one’s life are clearly…