Public Health Voices features commentary and analysis from Irwin Redlener, M.D., on pressing issues in public health along with guest insights from colleagues committed to science, compassion, and public service.
China’s decision to grow its nuclear weapons arsenal to be on a par with or potentially more advanced than that of the U.S. could not be worse news. I fear that the danger of an intentional or inadvertent launch of global nuclear war will soon be greater than it was when the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 put us on the brink of a nuclear apocalypse.
It is increasingly difficult to determine how many Ukrainian children have been killed, injured, or severely traumatized by Russia’s brutality since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The latest formal reports from United Nations agencies suggest that some 500 children have been killed and more than 800 severely injured as collateral casualties of the war.
Ukraine’s children matter to us. They are in the midst of an unrelenting catastrophe, dragged into a war, not of their choosing. Ukraine and the West will need all these kids to grow up educated and strong, ready to take on the enormous task of rebuilding the country that Vladimir Putin is trying to destroy. And that matters to us, too.
Ukraine's children are in trouble—and it's much more than their lives being at risk; it's the future of Ukraine itself. Children have been severely impacted by this unprovoked war. Hundreds of children have died in eastern or southern Ukraine since Feb. 24, and hundreds more have been injured – some severely.
Join Andy Revkin's Sustain What webcast to get the latest from Irwin Redlener, M.D., and Karen Redlener who is in Poland after his latest work in Lviv, Ukraine.
According to state health department data, there are currently 9,354 confirmed coronavirus infections in Oklahoma, up 5.1 percent from the previous day. “It’s likely that an event like this, at this particular moment, is going to be a super-spreader event,” Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University told The Daily Beast. Anthony Fauci, a leading infectious disease expert and key member of the White House coronavirus task force, confirmed that he would not attend, given the choice, citing his own high-risk demographic as a 79-year-old man.
“People are seeing this as a personal decision, and it’s based on our own personal risk tolerance,” said Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness and a professor of public health and pediatrics at Columbia University. “That’s not public health, because in public health, your risk should not be my risk.”
As a physician, my task is to keep people safe and as healthy as possible. Medicines, including vaccines, play a big role in this undertaking. However, almost equally dangerous as viral spread is the spread of false hope. To pacify expectations, I often turn to my public health colleague, Irwin Redlener, MD, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, Columbia University: “Suggestions that oral polio vaccine may have a role in temporarily preventing Covid-19 are provocative, but not really supported by the kind of evidence that would make many of us optimistic.” Dr. Redlener was surprised by Dr. Fauci’s public support of OPV. “It’s far too early to suggest that OPV is some kind of miraculous, low-cost preventive measure,” added the professor of pediatrics.
