Healthy Communities Online

Conversations on Health Care hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter welcome Project HOPE’s CEO Rabih Torbay and Director of Emergency Response and Preparedness Tom Cotter, who joined the show from the field in Bucharest, Romania. They share the daunting task of providing extensive support and local training to the existing medical infrastructure in handling both the destruction of medical facilities within Ukraine and the millions of refugees in need of medical and behavioral health services as they arrive in neighboring…

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As the world faces enormous challenges, in Ukraine and from COVID, it’s doing so without one of its global health champions. Dr. Paul Farmer, the co-founder and chief strategist of Partners In Health, unexpectedly passed away in February. This week Dr. Joia Mukherjee, the Chief Medical Officer of Partners in Health, shares memories with Conversations on Health Care hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter. She explains how the nonprofit’s focus will remain on community health in the countries it serves.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Peter Hotez, Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, and co-creator of a new, low-cost vaccine for COVID-19. Dr. Hotez discusses plans for Corbevax, a recombinant protein vaccine shown to be highly protective against COVID-19, which has just been given Emergency Use Authorization by the Indian government. Dr. Hotez’s plan is to make the formula available to poor and developing countries around…

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This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter welcome famed AIDS Researcher Dr. Robert Gallo, co-discoverer of the HIV virus, which led to the first tests and treatments for AIDS. He is Director of the Institute for Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and Co-founder of the Global Virus Network, a consortium of research centers of excellence in 66 countries around the world, a nongovernmental agency collaborating on emerging virus research. Dr. Gallo says their network…

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This week hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter welcome Dr. Eric Topol, Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, for his perspective on the rapid spread of the Omicron variant. He says early data shows that it is highly transmissible, but apparently not more deadly. His greater concern is around the current Delta surge leading to more infections, low vaccination rates in developing countries leading to more variants, and the “abysmal” vaccination performance in the U.S. He says mRNA vaccines…

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This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter examine the latest details about the omicron COVID variant, including the important role community health centers continue to play in the pandemic. In addition, we revisit their recent conversation with Planned Parenthood Federation of America President and CEO Alexis McGill Johnson on the Supreme Court hearing on the Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks, posing the greatest threat to Roe v. Wade in half a century. She also talks about systematic…

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