Nora Holzinger

 Through the Looking Glass I remember the day I found out I was unvaccinated.  I was struggling through the digital forms that would allow me to live on campus my freshman year of college, and I had to provide documentation that I was vaccinated appropriately.  I yelled downstairs to ask my mom if she had the documents.  “No” she shouted back.  “What? Where is it? What do you mean” I peppered her, finally leaving my room to come downstairs to the living room. “It doesn’t exist,” she said.  I was stunned.  She walked down the narrow basement stairs to rummage in the filing cabinet that held all my documents, and she returned from the depths of the storage room with a folded yellow card with my name and date of birth on it in her handwriting. Inside, the card was blank except for two lines – a polio vaccination and a tetanus shot at age two.  Living in a state with quite strict rules about vaccine exemptions, I had no choice – I had to get vaccinate...

  Right off the bat, let’s get something straight – I am not a vegan. I followed a vegan diet for about eight years, but I’m not currently.  However, as a public health epidemiologist, I’m starting to wonder if I should go back to veganism. COVID-19, Avian flu, anthrax, mad cow disease, and swine flu are all diseases that have “spilled over” into humans from the animals we eat.  With concern over Avian flu growing and the world still recovering from COVID, I’ve been wondering what long-term pandemic prevention would look like. And continued industrial farming isn’t part of that picture.  A recent article in Nature found that industrial fur farming is a “viral highway” where numerous infectious diseases are circulating - diseases with pandemic potential. Potentially pandemic pathogens are viruses, bacteria, and parasites that could spread quickly and easily in humans and could cause significant sickness and death. With not much difference in the living conditions b...

 Halfway through an epidemiology conference session, the last of the day and an hour before dinner, something a presenter said jolted me out of my hungry stupor:  “A lot of AI innovation is going to come out of the Global South.” I had only half paid attention to this woman’s presentation on software that uses artificial intelligence (AI) via cell phone camera to scan and digitize handwriting from paper health forms in Malawi, when I was suddenly transported back to an undergraduate anthropology class and a book titled Theory from the South (2012).  This book, written by anthropologists Jean and (now-disgraced) John Comaroff, in part posits that the Global North (Europe and America) is actually evolving to be more like the Global South (Latin America, Africa, parts of Asia). The authors go on to argue that the Global South has been treated like a “laboratory” of capitalism – where new configurations of industry, labor, and regulatory environments are tested and honed be...