By Abraar Karan
Dr. Sherry Wren, a Professor of General Surgery at Stanford School of Medicine, answers this question as she advocates for the addition of surgical care as a major facet in the global health dialogue. The talk is viewable here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGJyE5ytqD0 Dr. Wren bullet points the following facts that elucidate the scope of inequity in access [...]
By Abraar Karan
A large meta-analysis study published in the prestigious JAMA on January 2nd explored the association between various grades of obesity and all-cause mortality. 97 total studies were included in the final analysis, covering over 2.88 million patients and over 270,000 deaths. Patients’ Body Mass Index (BMI- weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared) [...]
By Abraar Karan
Indeed American medicine of 1980 has little resemblance to that of today. In 1980 the pharmaceutical industry did not promote its products on television. It was also a time when medicines were often introduced in other nations before they were in the United States, in part because the FDA spent more time making sure they [...]
By Abraar Karan
In my recent fieldwork with girls involved in intergenerational prostitution (prostituted by their husbands and in-laws), I have found it very difficult to find the answers I am looking for. Are these girls being forced to prostitute? Is this something they actually want to do, as they have indicated to me in our discussions? As [...]
By Abraar Karan
Paul Farmer and the new World Bank President Jim Kim called it the “neglected stepchild” of global health. Atul Gawande admitted his surprise, “I could not understand why the world was not seeing avoidable harm in surgery as a major danger to public health.” The global health agenda is moving forward at an astonishing pace, [...]
By Abraar Karan
I have been researching sex trafficking in India for the past 4 months and have realized the multifarious reality which is often falsely portrayed as uniform and clear-cut to the outside world. Not every woman who is selling sex in India’s brothels was kidnapped or lured with lies from a small village. This misperception perpetuates [...]
By Abraar Karan
I recently came across a television show, “Monsters Inside Me,” on Animal Planet which presents dramatized recollections of people’s experiences with parasitic infections. Parasites such as the Soil Transmitted Helminthes are on the World Health Organization’s list of Neglected Tropical Diseases. A multitude of parasitic infections are all too common in tropical climates, particularly in [...]
By Abraar Karan
In my past international experiences, I’ve encountered numerous cultural practices that have been curious and fascinating, from using chickens to ward off evil energy in India to eating fried grasshoppers as delicacies in Uganda to entertaining the wisdom of magical sobadores in Nicaragua. However, for the first time, I have come across a “cultural” practice [...]
By Abraar Karan
The numbers surprised me. Several thousands of women and girls each year routinely forced to have sex multiple times per day? 1 official and many unofficial trafficking circuits spanning the country? Over 5,000 brothels disguised as massage parlors? 13 as the average age of entrance into the trade? $200,000 in profit per girl per year? [...]
By Abraar Karan
I had the privilege of attending a private screening of Saving Face, the winner of Sunday night’s Oscar for Best Documentary (Short Subject), followed by a Q & A with one of the directors, Daniel Junge, and one of the documentary’s protagonists, Dr. Mohammad Jawad, a British-Pakistani plastic surgeon whose work the film revolves [...]
By Abraar Karan
The first major independent evaluation of the famous Millenium Villages Project (MVP) was released last year by Kenyan economist Bernadette Wanjala of Tilburg University in the Netherlands and has found an insignificant increase in household income in a Millennium Village compared to a control village. This is primarily because the increased agricultural production in the [...]
By Abraar Karan
The next time you crunch into a Kit-Kat or Hersheys chocolate bar, or eat a birthday cake topped with chocolate frosting, consider this: a young, uneducated, unpaid, malnourished West African child has likely cut open the cacao fruits that held the cocoa seeds of the chocolate which you are now eating. This child is working [...]
By Abraar Karan
I just returned from Delhi where I attended a conference for the launch of Academics Stand Against Poverty, a very interesting initiative started by a group of academics to facilitate the translation of academic research related to poverty into practice. After the conference ended, I heard an all too familiar tap at the window of [...]
By Abraar Karan
I just finished Healthcare, Guaranteed, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel’s book about the failure of the American healthcare system to provide accessible, affordable, and effective healthcare. I think that in general, most people are aware that our total healthcare spending ($2.6 trillion in 2010- the most in the world absolutely and as a % of GDP) is [...]
