Bio Night

Global Health is the in-thing, but no-one is quite sure what it is. I will seek to convince you that Global Health is nothing more than a pseudonym for what has gone before it: the much scorned ‘Tropical Medicine’, which in turn replaced the despised ‘colonial medicine’. Global Health is an umbrella term which groups together the health concerns of billions of browner and/or poorer people and makes an academic discipline out of studying diseases in ‘them’. I will debate ethical considerations from my experience of living in Ghana and Zambia, to my current research which seeks to improve diagnosis and treatment of Tuberculosis, pneumonia and sepsis in HIV-infected/exposed children.

When was the last time you went out hunting for dinner or started a fire from scratch? Millions of years of evolution finessed humans into social animals, collectively able to conquer and colonise the Earth. It all seemed to be going so well, so why is it going wrong now? Working in the area of obesity and the much-maligned FAT (Fabulous Adipose Tissue) cell, I realised that most chronic, 21st Century diseases weren’t ‘medical’ but ‘societal’. It was never (usually) the cell’s fault and it was never the individual’s fault. Perhaps together we can redesign aspects of our lives to help our bodies and minds get through this. It’ll be good for me, for you, and even for the planet!