It was the kind of statement that made you pause and look at the person wondering, “What on earth would prompt them to say something like that?” Unfortunately, this was a fairly regular occurrence. As someone who began every morning searching for the phrase “coronavirus vaccine” and reading the latest news articles, I became a […]
Tag: disease
Trump’s Misinformation Plague
How providing anti-vaccination proponents with a platform sidelines the greater discussion to be had regarding autism research “Vaccines worked so well… that people have forgotten the agony of infectious disease.” Kathryn Edwards, the chair of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University, made this remark concerning humanity’s unfortunate amnesia about the destruction of life wreaked by diseases throughout […]
Popping the Berkeley Bubble
“So…why’d you pick Berkeley?” my new friend asks, looking at me over the rims of his glasses. It’s a frequently asked question during Welcome Week, the favorite of awkward strangers-turned-conversationists in the dorms. Walking down Telegraph Avenue, I think about the answer as I take in the melange of people and activities around me. There’s […]
The Viral Consequences: Pakistan’s Polio Crisis
With the world focusing on the Ebola outbreak ravaging through West Africa, it is easy to overlook an equally dangerous disease lurking behind global headlines: polio. Polio, a highly infectious disease that can cause irreversible paralysis in children, is entirely preventable if young children are frequently given vaccines. Hundreds of thousands of children in the […]
Hypocrisy In the EPA: Environmental Discrimination in Louisiana
It has been decades since dioxin, a chemical contaminant, overtook the Mossville, Louisiana population. The deleterious toxin reigns supreme over its residents, conquering their lives one by one. Today, the African American community of Mossville is surrounded by fourteen industrial facilities within a half mile radius. These buildings have been spewing hazardous substances into […]