Featured series 
Tag: Harvard School of Public Health
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Health
Water solutions
The pictures — of children with sunken eyes and shriveled skin; oxen being herded across a river where women clean their clothes and fill their pitchers; an African villager sipping water from a shallow puddle — made the point like no words could at the May 11 Center for International Development symposium “The Impact of…
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Science & Tech
Forty percent of world lacks clean water, solutions sought
The pictures — of children with sunken eyes and shriveled skin; oxen being herded across a river where women clean their clothes and fill their pitchers; an African villager sipping water from a shallow puddle — made the point like no words could at the May 11 Center for International Development symposium “The Impact of…
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Campus & Community
Doing well while doing good is doable
“What better place,” observed social entrepreneur and philanthropist Catherine Reynolds, “to describe a new paradigm than here at Harvard?”
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Campus & Community
Dust from Asia invades North America
On the dustiest days in the western United States, 40 percent of the grime blows in from Asia. And fine particles can travel all the way around the world from Africa’s Sahara Desert. These unwanted visitors show up in a new model of dust imports developed by researchers from Harvard and the National Aeronautics and…
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Campus & Community
More blacks ‘misperceive’ weight problem
Overweight black Americans are two to three times more likely than heavy white Americans to say they are of average weight – even after being diagnosed as overweight or obese by their doctors, according to a new study led by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researchers. Weight misperception was most common among black men and women, and…
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Campus & Community
Study: Gap in energy among teens
A new study by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) shows that America’s overweight teens consumed an average of 700 to 1,000 calories more than required each day over a 10-year period. This “energy gap” – or the imbalance between the number of calories children consumed each day and the number they…
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Campus & Community
Hormones in milk can be dangerous
Ganmaa Davaasambuu is a physician (Mongolia), a Ph.D. in environmental health (Japan), a fellow (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study), and a working scientist (Harvard School of Public Health). On Monday (Dec. 4), she drew on all those roles during a lunchtime talk to most of her fellow fellows. Ganmaa’s topic was lunch-appropriate: the suspected role…
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Campus & Community
Migraine auras and heart disease linked – risks high for women
Marsha T. saw the lights of pain coming. They flashed and zigzagged before her eyes. Her visual field shrank into a tunnel. A registered nurse, she knew what was next. In about 30 minutes, a familiar sharp, pulsating pain ripped through her head. Now 48 years old, she had been suffering from migraine headaches with…
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Health
Study says moderate drinking reduces men’s heart attack risk
Even as studies have consistently found an association between moderate alcohol consumption and reduced heart attack risk in men, an important question has persisted: What if the men who drank in moderation were the same individuals who maintained good eating habits, didn’t smoke, exercised and watched their weight? How would you know that their reduced…
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Health
Study shows benefits of eating fish greatly outweigh risks
Many studies have shown the nutritional benefits of eating fish (finfish or shellfish). Fish is high in protein and omega-3 fatty acids. But concerns have been raised in recent years about chemicals found in fish from environmental pollution, including mercury, PCBs and dioxins. That has led to confusion among the public – do the risks…
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Campus & Community
Researchers discover mechanism that regulates bone growth
Harvard researchers have identified a protein that helps regulate bone growth and may lead to new drug targets to fight osteoporosis, the bone loss condition that the National Institutes of Health terms “a major public health threat” to more than half of people age 50 or older. The research, conducted by scientists at the Harvard…
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Science & Tech
Obesity levels in U.S. states are grossly underestimated
The prevalence of obesity in the U.S. states has been greatly underestimated. Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health analyzed data from health surveys, which are used to estimate obesity levels in states. Because people tend to provide incorrect information about their weight and height, especially in telephone surveys, the researchers concluded that estimates…
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Campus & Community
Fatty foods feed heart attacks, researchers say
Hold the french fries, doughnuts, and cookies, and save as many as 228,000 heart attacks and deaths from heart disease. That’s the message from a team of researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and Wageningen University in the Netherlands. “Given the 1.2 million annual [heart attacks] and deaths from coronary heart disease in…
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Science & Tech
Study finds M-rated video games contain violence, sexual themes, substances, and profanity not labeled on game boxes
According to a study led by Associate Professor Kimberly Thompson of the Kids Risk Project at Harvard School of Public Health, 81 percent of a random sample of “mature”-rated video games included content that was not noted on the game box. This is the first independent, quantitative study to characterize content in M-rated games related…
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Science & Tech
Child enrichment program still pays off after 15 years
Researchers have detected the lasting benefits of early childhood education 15 years after the program ended. What may have seemed like three years of fun and games at the time for the low-birth weight, premature infants translated into higher achievement scores in math and reading for the intervention group at age 18. They also tended…
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Campus & Community
Exercise cuts risk of sudden cardiac death
Exercise improves your health, but can you kill yourself with too much snow shoveling, yard work, jogging, or playing tennis? “Despite all of the known benefits of exercise, there are also well-documented associations between acute episodes of exertion and sudden cardiac death,” notes Christine Albert, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Although…
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Campus & Community
James Robins makes statistics tell the truth
The white board that covers hundreds of feet of the curved hallway at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) is not always covered with equations – but lately, it usually is. And most of them are in the haphazard hand of James M. Robins, an IQSS faculty associate and a professor of epidemiology and…
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Health
Smoke-free pubs keep Irish eyes smiling
A survey of air pollution levels in “Irish pubs” around the world has found that indoor air pollution in authentic Irish pubs in Ireland, where a smoke-free law has been in effect for two years, is 91 percent lower than in “Irish pubs” located in other countries and cities where smoke-free laws do not apply.…
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Science & Tech
Mold, mold everywhere
Mold has attacked what remains of New Orleans, engulfing the city in slime. Typically, clean indoor environments show mold spore concentrations of less than 1,000 per cubic meter of air. But in Katrina’s wake, the numbers have hit several million due to widespread, persistent flooding. That’s the preliminary report from Christine Rogers, a senior research…
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Campus & Community
Containment buys time but…
Containing an emerging bird flu pandemic at its source will probably only delay – not stop – the illness’ spread because of likely multiple introductions of the pathogen, assert researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the University of Washington in a policy paper in PLoS Medicine. The paper will appear in…
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Campus & Community
Violence as a health problem
“Are we a nation in which violence is out of control and will plague us and will interfere with our freedom?” asks Felton Earls, professor of social medicine at Harvard Medical School and professor of human behavior and development at Harvard School of Public Health. “Violence reduces confidence that all the other things that we…
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Campus & Community
Coffee gets cleared of blood pressure risk
Harvard researchers set out to test the idea that a lot of coffee isn’t good for your circulation. They followed 155,000 female nurses for 12 years, questioning them regularly about their caffeine-drinking habits and their blood pressure. No connection was found between their coffee intake and a risky rise in blood pressure. In fact, results…
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Science & Tech
Cigarette manufacturers developed candy-flavored brands to target youth
Despite assurances from cigarette makers that they no longer target the youth market, Harvard School of Public Health researchers found that new brands are being marketed to young smokers and racial/ethnic groups using colorful and stylish packaging and exploiting adolescents’ attraction to candy flavors. The study appears in the November/December 2005 issue of the journal,…
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Campus & Community
Doctors overprescribing antibiotics for sore throats
Doctors treating sore throats are overprescribing antibiotics to more than a million U.S. children annually, unnecessarily driving up health costs, promoting the rise of drug-resistant bugs, and exposing children to unnecessary drugs and their side effects. That’s the conclusion of a new study of national treatment data by faculty at Harvard Medical School and the…
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Campus & Community
Green Campus contest puts wind in energy’s sails
The Harvard Green Campus Initiative is giving Harvard students and staff the chance to turn their energy conservation habits – or their new resolutions to conserve – into clean wind power. The EmPOWER Harvard campaign seeks to get as many people as possible to sign an online pledge form before midnight Nov. 23 – the…