‘Outbreak Week’ at Harvard opens with talk on how diseases often spread unchecked
Pandemics are political, and the spread of disease is a common consequence of global conflict. In a lecture titled “Conflict and the Global Threat of Pandemics,” Michele Barry, senior dean of global health and director of the Center for Innovation in Global Health at Stanford University, examined the relationship between unrest and health crises. Monday evening’s talk at the Geological Lecture Hall at Harvard Museum of Natural History was the start of Harvard Global Health Institute’s “Outbreak Week,” a five-day series of events to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. As Ashish K. Jha, dean for global strategy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, noted in his opening remarks, that pandemic remains the deadliest in history, though HIV has come close. He also outlined Harvard’s work with infectious diseases, notably its 2014 development of strategies to address the Ebola virus. Barry, a specialist in tropical...