BIRCH team
Kristie Ebi climate change
June 20, 2016 | Health News

NY Times: 'Rare, Dangerous' Heat Headed to Parts of Western US

LOS ANGELES — It's a dry heat, Phoenix residents like to say about Arizona's hot weather. That bravado may vanish as the thermometer flirts with 120 degrees this weekend.

Phoenix won't be alone in the oven. A strengthening ridge of high pressure lifting out of Mexico is on course to also scorch other parts of Arizona and Southern California, bringing potentially record-shattering temperatures.

Though accustomed to triple digits, the upcoming heat spell is a rarity in Phoenix, a desert metropolis of 1.5 million people, raising concerns of heat stroke.

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Ana Mari Cauce University of Washington Population Health Puget Sound Business Journal
May 05, 2016 | Health News

Puget Sound Business Journal: UW President: Place of Birth or Ethnicity Should Not Determine Your Health

By Coral Garnick

University of Washington President Ana Mari Cauce is challenging the people and companies in the Puget Sound area to come up with solutions to improve the health of people in the region and across the country.

She announced Tuesday she is creating a population health leadership council. The group will be charged with developing a 25-year vision for making the UW and the Puget Sound region a global hub for improving population health.

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Zika Virus David Pigott NBC News
April 29, 2016 | Health News

NBC: New Map Finds 2 Billion People at Risk of Zika Virus

By Maggie Fox

A new global map calculating when and where Zika virus is likely to spread shows 2 billion people could be in the Zika zone.

Nearly 300 million people in the Americas live in areas where the mosquitoes that spread Zika thrive, and more than 5 million babies a year are born to women living in these areas, the team at the University of Washington, Oxford University and elsewhere report in the journal ELife.

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Nicole Frahm HIV/AIDS HIV Vaccine HIV Prevention Collaboration for AIDS Vaccine Discovery Data Visualization
April 20, 2016 | Health News

Co.Design: How Designers are Helping HIV Researchers Find a Vaccine

Rethinking how scientists share data -- especially the inconclusive results -- may be the key.

By Mark Wilson

The Collaboration for AIDS Vaccine Discovery (CAVD) consists of a group of labs across the world, all pooling their data with one goal in mind: to create an AIDS vaccine as fast as possible. But the theory of sharing vast amounts of data is easier than the practice.

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Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Washington Global Health Alliance PATH World Vision Paul Allen New York Times
April 08, 2016 | Health News

New York Times: For Some Nonprofits, Changing the World Begins in Seattle

By Kirk Johnson

SEATTLE — Inside the factory buildings at Cascade Designs, just south of downtown Seattle, camping and hiking gear for the rugged outdoor life of the Pacific Northwest has been manufactured since the early 1970s. But turn a corner and something new is coming off the shop floor: a compact, no-frills water purifier designed to bring clean water to struggling populations in rural Africa.

...

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Bioengineering Diagostics Paul Yager Scientific American
March 31, 2016 | Health News

Scientific American: Paper Diagnostic Tests Could Save Thousands of Lives

By Prachi Patel

...Paul Yager, a biochemist at the University of Washington, meanwhile, has developed a handheld plastic device the size of two stacked card decks that contains strips of patterned paper and wells containing reagents and dyes, and into which a user would insert a fluid sample. The patterns of dots that appear after 20 minutes could be read by a clinician or sent via smartphone camera to a physician elsewhere. Yager says that the box could cost as little as $1 to manufacture in bulk.

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Ebola Karin Huster Infectious Disease Nursing Health Systems
March 28, 2016 | Health News

NPR: WHO Says Ebola Epidemic Is Over. What Have (And Haven't) We Learned?

By Karin Huster, MPH ('14)

This month marks two years since the first Ebola cases were confirmed in Guinea. The time has come for recollection and reflection, frank opinions and lessons learned. What did we do well? What should we have done differently? What has Ebola taught us? I spent 6 weeks in Liberia, 4 1/2 months in Sierra Leone, and 6 months in Guinea during the epidemic, working with Ebola patients and focusing on strategies to fight the disease. These thoughts come from the experiences that I had working in the field.

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