Disease

There has much coverage of the plight of sunflower sea stars, the large starfishes with 16 to 24 arms that inhabit the Pacific Coast of North America. A wasting disease that hit the population starting in 2013 killed off more than 90% of the population from Mexico to Alaska. Only recently has the underlying cause of the disease been identified: a specific bacterium of the Vibrio genus. But sunflower sea stars aren’t the only species that have fallen victim to the wasting disease. In fact, it has killed billions of sea stars in up to 20 species.

Kristina Marusic is an award-winning journalist who covers environmental health and justice for Environmental Health News.Her new book is “A New War on Cancer: The Unlikely Heroes Revolutionizing Prevention.”

Before Covid-19, public health programs constituted only 2.5 percent of all US health spending, with the other 97.5 percent going towards the larger health care system. In fact, the United States spends on average $11,000 per citizen per year on health care, but only $286 per person on public health. It seems that Americans value health care, the medical care of individuals, over public health, the well-being of collections of people. In "Me vs. Us," primary care doctor and public health advocate Michael Stein takes a hard, insightful look at the larger questions behind American health and health care.

Before Covid-19, public health programs constituted only 2.5 percent of all US health spending, with the other 97.5 percent going towards the larger health care system. In fact, the United States spends on average $11,000 per citizen per year on health care, but only $286 per person on public health. It seems that Americans value health care, the medical care of individuals, over public health, the well-being of collections of people. In "Me vs. Us," primary care doctor and public health advocate Michael Stein takes a hard, insightful look at the larger questions behind American health and health care.

Kyle Harper's "Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History" (Princeton University Press) blends biology and economics to create a sweeping, global history of infectious disease from chimpanzees to COVID-19 and with a look to the future.

Lawrence Wright is a Pulitzer Prize winning author and New Yorker staff writer whose new book, “The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid,” is an…

Bestselling author Michael Lewis’s new book, “The Premonition: A Pandemic Story,” is a non-fiction thriller that pits a band of medical visionaries…

Sexually transmitted diseases have been hidden players in our lives for the whole of human history, with roles in everything from World War II to the…

Dr. Sam Myers is a Principal Research Scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and founding Director of the Planetary Health Alliance.…

Joe Donahue: In the new thriller “The End of October” from the Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author Lawrence Wright, Dr. Henry Parsons an unlikely…