Editor's Note: Travel fellows apply for funding that supports travel costs and allows them to take advantage of opportunities abroad that meet degree requirements and deepen their understanding of what global health work looks like around the world. Funds are generously given by private donors who value experiential learning within global health. 

Congratulations Dr. Anna Larsen (Acting Assistant Professor, UW Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences) for receiving a National Institute of Health Research Scientist Development Award to fund “Improving fathers’ mental health, parenting, and familial engagement through an mHealth intervention in Kenya.”

Congratulations to Dr. Arianna Means (Associate Professor, Global Health) for receiving a National Institutes of Health award for the AMANI (Accelerating Maternal And Neonatal survIval) trial that will test a practice facilitation package (of training materials, tools, and other resources) that could help stakeholders better understand the circumstances surrounding maternal and perinatal deaths, leading to improved quality of care and reduced mortality among mothers and infants. Study collaborators include Dr. John Kinuthia (Kenyatta National Hospital), Dr.

Congratulations to Dr. Dickens Onyango (Deputy Director of Medical Services, Kisumu County Health Department and visiting research scientist at Kenyatta National Hospital, Kenya) for receiving a National Institute of Health Fogarty Emerging Global Leader Award for “Enhancing Adherence and Completion of the Three-Month Isoniazid with Rifapentine (3HP) Tuberculosis Preventive Therapy Regimen Through Biomarker-Guided Adherence Counselling (ACT-TPT).”

Global WACh Co-Directors, Dr. Irene Njuguna and Grace John-Stewart, are Multiple Principal Investigators of a new five-year National Institutes of Health award for “Impact of HIV and toxic metals exposure on neurodevelopment at school age (HOPE-X).” 

Fluoride is a naturally occurring mineral that protects teeth from tooth decay. Generally, all water contains some naturally occurring fluoride, but not enough to prevent tooth decay, which has led many communities to add additional fluoride to the water to combat tooth decay. U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said he intends to push for removal of fluoride from the public water supplies across the country, calling it an “industrial waste.” Dr.

Bill Gates calls for a “strategic pivot” in the global climate fight: from focusing on limiting rising temperatures to fighting poverty and preventing disease. University of Washington public health and climate scientist Kristie Ebi agrees with Gates that the U.N. negotiations should focus on improving human health and well-being, but thinks it's unlikely that changing one variable will curb climate change.

In recent weeks, the GOP has set its sights on getting rid of an algorithmic process called "differential privacy", which was created to keep census data from being used to identify individual respondents. According to research by Abraham Flaxman, associate professor of global health and of health metrics sciences at the UW, this could mean that someone could use census data without differential privacy to identify transgender youth. 

The world is on track to add nearly two months of dangerous superhot days each year by the end of the century a study released Thursday found. University of Washington public health and climate scientist Kristie Ebi, who wasn’t part of Thursday’s report, says that other groups are also finding more than hundreds of thousands of deaths from recent heat waves in peer-reviewed research with much of it because of human-caused climate change.

A group of young people are suing the Trump administration to block the president's executive orders "unleashing" American energy, claiming the health effects of fossil fuels violate their Fifth Amendment rights. Kristie Ebi, professor of global health and environmental and occupational health sciences at UW, shares how the health effects of a warming world are established in scientific literature.