Better Off

What has the environmental movement accomplished since the first Earth Day in 1970? Where is the movement headed? Gina McCarthy, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council and chair of the Board of Advisors at the Harvard Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment (C-CHANGE), reflects on the strides we’ve made and the need to frame climate change as a public health crisis going forward.

For full transcript, visit: https://hsph.me/earthdayat50

Could an app help scientists better understand menstruation, fertility, and menopause? On the latest episode of This Week in Health, Shruthi Mahalingaiah and JP Onnela talk about the groundbreaking Apple Women’s Health Study.

Shruthi Mahalingaiah, an assistant professor of environmental, reproductive, and women’s health, and JP Onnela, an associate professor of biostatistics, are two of the Harvard Chan School researchers involved in a new study seeking to gain more insight into women’s health. Using an app on their Apple devices, women can share information about their monthly cycles, as well as certain behavioral factors such as physical activity and mobility, to help researchers advance understanding of menstrual and gynecological health. To learn more about the study, or to participate, visit www.hsph.harvard.edu/applewomenshealthstudy.

Full transcript available here: https://hsph.me/womenhealthpod

Before Mary Bassett was director of Harvard’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, she was New York City’s Health Commissioner. Bassett talks about her experience dealing with the growing opioid epidemic in the city—what worked, what didn’t, and what New York can teach other cities coping with the same problem. She sat down with Kimberlyn Leary, an associate professor at Harvard Chan School and a psychologist at Harvard's McLean hospital who specializes in public health policy.

Full transcript: https://hsph.me/nyc-opioid-pod

You can subscribe to Harvard Chan: This Week in Health by visiting Apple Podcasts or Google Play and you can listen to it by following us on Soundcloud, and stream it on the Stitcher app or on Spotify.

Shelly Greenfield to unpacks the stigma that surrounds addiction. A psychiatrist from Harvard’s McLean hospital, Greenfield specializes in addiction—how patients cope with it, how it factors into treatment, and how it works its way slowly into policy. Greenfield sat down with Mary Bassett, director of Harvard’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights.

Full Transcript: https://hsph.me/stigma-pod

You can subscribe to Harvard Chan: This Week in Health by visiting Apple Podcasts or Google Play and you can listen to it by following us on Soundcloud, and stream it on the Stitcher app or on Spotify.

Physicians’ over-prescription of opioid painkillers opened the door to the current opioid crisis. What can health care providers do to fix it?

Chad Brummett, a pain management specialist from the University of Michigan, shares a new approach to combat Michigan's opioid crisis that could be a model for the rest of the nation. Brummett sat down with Mary Bassett, director of Harvard’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights.

Full Transcript: https://hsph.me/prescription-pod

You can subscribe to Harvard Chan: This Week in Health by visiting Apple Podcasts or Google Play and you can listen to it by following us on Soundcloud, and stream it on the Stitcher app or on Spotify.

Each year in Zambia, 60,000 people are infected with HIV, and more than 20,000 die of AIDs. In all, it’s estimated that more than 1.2 million people in the country are living with HIV. Research shows that over 90% of Zambians have heard of HIV but less than 40% have a thorough knowledge of the virus or how to protect themselves. In this week's episode, we're talking to the people behind a collaborative project working to fill that knowledge by harnessing the influence of some of Zambia’s most popular musicians.

The goal is to produce songs and music videos that can reach youth across Zambia with important messages about HIV prevention. We spoke to three of the people making this possible. Katy Weinberg recently graduated with an MPH from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and works in the Global Health Program at Boston Children’s Hospital. She has partnered on the project with her colleague, David Bickham, a research scientist at the Hospital’s Center on Media and Child Health. And we were also lucky to be joined by one of the musicians collaborating with Katy and David—Ephraim "Son of Africa."

Full Transcript: https://hsph.me/zambia-pod

In this week’s episode we're talking about new research comparing the health of athletes in the National Football League and Major League Baseball. The study looked at 6,000 athletes between the years of 1979 and 2013. During that period, there were 517 deaths among NFL players and 431 deaths among MLB players, translating into a 26% higher mortality rate among football players compared with baseball players. The findings showed that while NFL players died of neurodegenerative diseases at a higher rate than MLB players, both groups of athletes were more likely to die of cardiovascular disease than brain diseases.

The study was led by Marc Weisskopf, Cecil K. and Philip Drinker Professor of Environmental Epidemiology and Physiology at the Harvard Chan School. The research comes amid increasing concerns over the effects of repeated head trauma on the health of NFL players. And while the study did show a difference in death rates, it’s still unclear exactly what’s driving that disparity—and how to address it. We sat down with Weisskopf to discuss the research and the unanswered questions he’s hoping to answer in the future.

Full Transcript: https://hsph.me/sports-pod

What does it mean for someone to flourish? Flourishing is more than just being happy—although that’s a part of it. But the idea of flourishing expands beyond happiness to look at a person’s overall well-being, taking into account things like life satisfaction or someone’s sense of purpose. That’s why studying flourishing is an interdisciplinary science drawing on public health, philosophy, psychology, and more.

In this week’s episode we’re talking to two researchers from Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University who are tackling big questions about flourishing: What does it mean for people to flourish? How do we measure it? And are there things that make people more or less likely to flourish?

Our guests are Tyler VanderWeele, director of the Human Flourishing Program and John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology in the Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Harvard Chan School, and Matthew Wilson, associate director of the Human Flourishing Program and a research associate at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science.

Full Transcript: https://hsph.me/flourishingpod

A new study shows that transgender and gender-nonbinary teens face a greater risk of sexual assault in schools that prevent them from using bathrooms or locker rooms consistent with their gender identity. In this week's episode we speak with the study's author, Gabe Murchison, a doctoral student at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Murchison explains why restrooms and locker room policies are so critical and outlines steps that schools, parents, and physicians can take to create more inclusive environments for transgender and gender-nonbinary adolescents.

Full Transcript: hsph.me/gender-pod

In this week's podcast we're sharing a special conversation between Cecile Richards, former president of Planned Parenthood and one of the co-founders of Supermajority, and Mary Bassett, director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. Richards spoke about how Supermajority is working to empower women and organize them around key issues related to gender equity, including equal pay and child care. The two also spoke about the recent spate of anti-abortion laws across the United States and the need to protect reproductive rights.

Full Transcript: hsph.me/richards-pod