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Public Health is Political

“We adhere to a higher law and that is one of humanity.”
— Cheri Honkala

From the Editors

Indigenous Peoples’ Day, though not a federal holiday, is now nationally celebrated on what used to be observed as Columbus Day. Columbus Day, recognized on the second Monday of October each year, is a federal holiday that celebrates Christopher Columbus’s arrival to the Americas in 1492 and more insidiously, celebrates the death, displacement, and subjugation of Indigenous peoples. Whether or not he was the first to bring infectious diseases here is debated and beside the point. What matters is that, as one of the original colonizers, he set in motion systems of violence, exploitation, and disease that reshaped entire continents. 

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Featured Articles

Permission to Narrate a Humanitarian Crisis

Mohammad Salaymeh

This essay argues that Médecins Sans Frontières’s (MSF) humanitarian logic in Palestine simultaneously relies on Palestinian voices and silences them, transforming political struggle into a humanitarian spectacle. Writing through the ongoing genocide in Gaza as a Palestinian humanitarian worker, I ask: how does MSF’s mode of operation, which claims neutrality and universality, actually reproduce structures of epistemic injustice, inequality, and

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Our Bodies, Their Data: Abortion Criminalization in the Age of Surveillance

Daira Rivera

In the United States, the womb has been subject to political attacks, with their enforcement carried out by the technological and policing arms of the state. In the reproductive rights landscape, the weapon of choice is abortion bans. Additional weapons have included rape and forced childbirth imposed on Indigenous and enslaved Black women, the removal of children, coerced sterilization, and

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Artificial Intelligence, abstract artistic human head portrait made of dotted particles array, vector software digital visual interface. Digital soul, spirit of technological time.

AI’s Questionable Alchemy Turns Ethical Uncertainties Into Technical Decisions

Valerie Black

Public health organizations are already relying on AI to make critical decisions about resource allocation—often without fully examining why they are outsourcing these judgements to AI in the first place. This is significant because it sets the stage for conflating “AI is better than a human” with “AI makes things easier for a human.” In 1948, before the term artificial

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On the soapbox:
April Reed

Bringing a Little Light

“It looks like saying ‘I’m proud of you’ and offering a hug. It looks like driving them to and from school, even if it means waking up earlier than necessary. It looks like showing up with a birthday cake and balloons to a skills session, even when they disappoint you. It looks like asking, ‘What do you see for your future?’ Everything don’t have to be so dominant. We’re already coming from the darkness. We need a little light.”

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More to Read

Why Public Health Must Return to its Political Roots

Michaela Kupfer

Health is the manifestation of all that the human body experiences. The water we drink, the homes we live in, the streets we walk on – all of this shapes our health. That is to say, how resources are distributed within our society and who has the power to determine that distribution are critical determinants of health. Ensuring the health of

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How Neoliberalism Shapes Behavioral Science

Shameeta M

Behavioural science has become an increasingly popular discipline to address public health issues and gaps. The use of behavioural science for public health stems from the perspective that behaviours are crucial in shaping health outcomes. The World Health Organization’s (WHO) website on behavioural science for health mentions right at the beginning, “Human behaviour affects health outcomes.” When behavioural science is

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Essential Yet Expendable: Reflections From a Community Health Worker

Wolfgang V. Bahr

On my first day as a community health worker (CHW) at a federally qualified health center (FQHC), a young mother stepped into the food pantry within our clinic, a resource available to patients and community members once a week. She had no health insurance, spoke Spanish, and was looking for food to carry her family through the week; she was

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