Public Health Insight

In the early 1980s, Dr. Frank Putnam noticed that the children referred to him had very different symptoms but one thing in common: a history of abuse. In this episode of the Public Health Insight Podcast, Dr. Putnam, author of Old Before Their Time, walks us through the path that led him from adult psychiatry to child protection. He also explains how he launched a study that followed abused girls for decades, at a time when many dismissed the work as a social problem rather than a scientific one.

References for Our Discussion

◼️New Book: Old Before Their Time: A Scientific Life Investigating How Maltreatment Harms Children and the Adults They Become **Participate in the book giveaway. Contest rules at the end of the description**

Guest

◼️Dr. Frank Putnam

Host

◼️ Purva Mehta, BMSc, MSc

Producer

◼️Gordon Thane, BMSc, MPH, PMP®

Production Notes

◼️ Music from Johnny Harris x Tom Fox: The Music Room

Leave Us Some Feedback

If you enjoy our podcasts, be sure to subscribe and leave us a rating on Apple Podcast or Spotify, and spread the word to your friends to help us get discovered by more people. You can also interact directly with the podcast episodes on Spotify using the new “comment” feature! We’d love to hear what you think.

Send us a Text Message to let us know what you think.

Book Giveaway Contest

We're giving away a signed copy of Dr. Frank Putnam's new book, Old Before Their Time: A Scientific Life Investigating How Maltreatment Harms Children and the Adults They Become. You can participate wherever you are in the world. To enter, just send an email to [email protected] with "Book Giveaway" in the subject line.

Entries close October 21st, and we'll reach out to the winner on Oct 23rd. 

A tobacco company promises jobs, investment and a factory, but only if a government makes health warnings smaller. Investigative journalist Matthew Chapman joins the Public Health Insight Podcast to examine how tobacco companies adapt their products and influence the rules governing them. Drawing on investigations in Kenya, Israel and the United Kingdom, he reveals undisclosed payments to experts, pressure on policymakers and efforts to weaken or delay regulation. The conversation explores Britain’s generational tobacco ban, the immense death toll linked to China Tobacco, and the limits of personal choice for addictive substances. 

Guest

◼️Matthew Chapman 

References for Our Discussion

◼️Lawmaker with family tie to British American Tobacco attempts to stop UK smoking ban 

◼️British American Tobacco undermines Kenyan health laws in bid for Gen Z

◼️What to know about the global tobacco control treaty

Host & Producer

◼️Gordon Thane, BMSc, MPH, PMP®

Production Notes

◼️ Music from Johnny Harris x Tom Fox: The Music Room

Leave Us Some Feedback

If you enjoy our podcasts, be sure to subscribe and leave us a rating on Apple Podcast or Spotify, and spread the word to your friends to help us get discovered by more people. You can also interact directly with the podcast episodes on Spotify using the new “comment” feature! We’d love to hear what you think.

Send us a Text Message to let us know what you think.

When a disaster is prevented, it doesn't make the news and most don't hear about it; and that's exactly the problem. In this episode of the Public Health Insight Podcast with Dr. Barry Davis, biostatistician and author of The Preventioneers, we explore why prevention's biggest successes stay invisible. We discuss why climate warnings have gone unheeded for 170 years, why treatment beats prevention for the "popular vote," and how to rebuild trust with a public that distrusts experts. The answer isn't more data, but humility, storytelling, and trusted messengers.

References for Our Discussion

◼️[NEW BOOK] The Preventioneers: Diseases, Disasters, and the Discoveries That Changed Our World

◼️An Ounce of Prevention: A Substack by Barry R. Davis 

Host

◼️ Purva Mehta, BMSc, MSc

Producer

◼️Gordon Thane, BMSc, MPH, PMP®

Production Notes

◼️ Music from Johnny Harris x Tom Fox: The Music Room

Leave Us Some Feedback

If you enjoy our podcasts, be sure to subscribe and leave us a rating on Apple Podcast or Spotify, and spread the word to your friends to help us get discovered by more people. You can also interact directly with the podcast episodes on Spotify using the new “comment” feature! We’d love to hear what you think.

Send us a Text Message to let us know what you think.

A doctor proves handwashing saves lives and gets destroyed for it. A president dies of a preventable stroke. Scientists spend decades proving smoking kills while the industry fights back. In this episode of the Public Health Insight Podcast, Dr. Barry Davis, author of The Preventioneers, introduces us to people in history who saw catastrophe coming, built the evidence, and ran straight into resistance from industries, institutions, and a public that didn't want to hear it. If prevention saves lives, protects health, and saves money, why do we keep ignoring it until it's too late? This episode digs into that question.

References for Our Discussion

◼️[NEW BOOK] The Preventioneers: Diseases, Disasters, and the Discoveries That Changed Our World

◼️An Ounce of Prevention: A Substack by Barry R. Davis 

Host

◼️ Purva Mehta, BMSc, MSc

Producer

◼️Gordon Thane, BMSc, MPH, PMP®

Production Notes

◼️ Music from Johnny Harris x Tom Fox: The Music Room

Leave Us Some Feedback

If you enjoy our podcasts, be sure to subscribe and leave us a rating on Apple Podcast or Spotify, and spread the word to your friends to help us get discovered by more people. You can also interact directly with the podcast episodes on Spotify using the new “comment” feature! We’d love to hear what you think.

Send us a Text Message to let us know what you think.

We often have the evidence to prevent harm long before we actually do something about it, and that delay costs lives. In this episode of the Public Health Insight Podcast, we sit down with a physician and mathematician whose career spans early machine learning research in the 1980s, landmark hypertension trials, and over 150 data monitoring committees. Dr. Davis reflects on the experiences that shaped his thinking and how resistance to change repeats throughout history.

References for Our Discussion

◼️[NEW BOOK] The Preventioneers: Diseases, Disasters, and the Discoveries That Changed Our World

◼️An Ounce of Prevention: A Substack by Barry R. Davis 

Host

◼️ Purva Mehta, BMSc, MSc

Producer

◼️Gordon Thane, BMSc, MPH, PMP®

Production Notes

◼️ Music from Johnny Harris x Tom Fox: The Music Room

Leave Us Some Feedback

If you enjoy our podcasts, be sure to subscribe and leave us a rating on Apple Podcast or Spotify, and spread the word to your friends to help us get discovered by more people. You can also interact directly with the podcast episodes on Spotify using the new “comment” feature! We’d love to hear what you think.

Send us a Text Message to let us know what you think.

Daniella wanted to make a podcast for years, but she waited for the right idea. Then she noticed no one had made a public health show this honest and this bold, especially from a Black perspective. So she made it herself.

In this episode, Daniella shares how she started Public Health Is Dead, built on years of teaching herself to record and edit on her own. It grew out of a frustration she kept running into: public health is known for holding the world accountable, but can fall short when it comes to turning that same honesty on itself.

Check Out

◼️Public Health Is Dead

Guest

◼️Daniella Barreto

Host & Producer

◼️Gordon Thane, BMSc, MPH, PMP®

Production Notes

◼️ Music from Johnny Harris x Tom Fox: The Music Room

Leave Us Some Feedback

If you enjoy our podcasts, be sure to subscribe and leave us a rating on Apple Podcast or Spotify, and spread the word to your friends to help us get discovered by more people. You can also interact directly with the podcast episodes on Spotify using the new “comment” feature! We’d love to hear what you think.

Send us a Text Message to let us know what you think.

A cannabis conference. A front-row seat she wasn't supposed to have. A question to Snoop Dogg about racial justice in cannabis legislation that she absolutely was not going to leave unasked. In this episode of a 4-part series in collaboration between Public Health Insight Podcast and Public Health Is Dead, Gordon Thane rewinds to the early beginnings of Daniella Barreto's story, which includes a childhood in Zimbabwe, a mother who made immunology a dinner-table subject, immigration to Vancouver, HIV research, and the discovery that audio storytelling was her medium, inspired by a Big Brother-style experience. 

References for Our Discussion

◼️Public Health Is Dead

Guest

◼️Daniella Barreto

Host & Producer

◼️Gordon Thane, BMSc, MPH, PMP®

Production Notes

◼️ Music from Johnny Harris x Tom Fox: The Music Room

Leave Us Some Feedback

If you enjoy our podcasts, be sure to subscribe and leave us a rating on Apple Podcast or Spotify, and spread the word to your friends to help us get discovered by more people. You can also interact directly with the podcast episodes on Spotify using the new “comment” feature! We’d love to hear what you think.

Send us a Text Message to let us know what you think.

Ever wonder why people ignore free health services, conveniently placed in their community, even when their life could depend on it? Looking back to the 1950s gives us some clues, and what researchers discovered led to the creation of one of public health's most enduring frameworks for understanding human behavior. In this episode of the Public Health Insight Podcast, host Gordon Thane unpacks the Health Belief Model and why it still shapes health promotion practice today.

Source Material

◼️ Theory at a Glance: A Guide For Health Promotion Practice 

Host & Producer

◼️Gordon Thane, BMSc, MPH, PMP®

Production Notes

◼️ Music from Johnny Harris x Tom Fox: The Music Room

Leave Us Some Feedback

If you enjoy our podcasts, be sure to subscribe and leave us a rating on Apple Podcast or Spotify, and spread the word to your friends to help us get discovered by more people. You can also interact directly with the podcast episodes on Spotify using the new “comment” feature! We’d love to hear what you think.

Send us a Text Message to let us know what you think.

An MPH can cost two years, tens of thousands of dollars, the salary you would have earned if you continued to work instead, and the promise of the other degree that you decided not to pursue. So is it worth it? 

In this episode of the Public Health Insight Podcast, host Gordon Thane breaks down how to think through the real return on investment of a Master of Public Health, from tuition and debt to opportunity cost and the alternatives most people never seriously compare. Whether you are about to start a program, still weighing the decision, or already graduated and figuring out what comes next, this one is for you.

Host & Producer

◼️Gordon Thane, BMSc, MPH, PMP®

Production Notes

◼️ Music from Johnny Harris x Tom Fox: The Music Room

Leave Us Some Feedback

If you enjoy our podcasts, be sure to subscribe and leave us a rating on Apple Podcast or Spotify, and spread the word to your friends to help us get discovered by more people. You can also interact directly with the podcast episodes on Spotify using the new “comment” feature! We’d love to hear what you think.

Send us a Text Message to let us know what you think.

Health isn't created only in hospitals. It's achieved in housing, food systems, workplaces, and political decisions. In this episode of the Public Health Insight Podcast, host Gordon Thane traces the arc of health promotion through its defining milestones, from the Ottawa Charter to the Geneva Charter, revealing how each global conference pushed the field to see further: beyond behavior, beyond healthcare, beyond borders. Yet the gap between what we know and what we do remains wide. This episode asks the question the field still wrestles with: what would it take to build a world where health is created, not just treated?

Source Material

1. A New Perspective on the Health of Canadians
2. Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion
3. Focus On: Foundations of Health Promotion
4. Seventh Global Conference on Health Promotion: Promoting Health and Development — Closing the Implementation Gap
5. The Geneva Charter for Well-being
6. Shaping Global Health Promotion: A Comprehensive Analysis of the 10 Global Conferences on Health Promotion Conferences, 1986–2021

Host & Producer

◼️Gordon Thane, BMSc, MPH, PMP®

Production Notes

◼️ Music from Johnny Harris x Tom Fox: The Music Room

Leave Us Some Feedback

If you enjoy our podcasts, be sure to subscribe and leave us a rating on Apple Podcast or Spotify, and spread the word to your friends to help us get discovered by more people. You can also interact directly with the podcast episodes on Spotify using the new “comment” feature! We’d love to hear what you think.

Send us a Text Message to let us know what you think.