Where is the Role of Philanthropy in the RESTORE Act?

The RESTORE Act presents an historic opportunity to invest in the revitalization of the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem on an unprecedented scale. The Act also can provide support for spurring economic recovery for a region hit hard by the BP Deepwater Horizon spill of 2010. Though much remains uncertain about how the Act will be funded and put to use, enough is clear to take stock of what the Act can do, what it will not do, and how affected communities and stakeholders might best engage the RESTORE Act process to ensure it fulfills its promise of a revitalized Gulf of Mexico.Given the unprecedented nature of the RESTORE Act and the hopes and expectations that many have for the Act, it is important to keep in mind what the Act will not and cannot be expected to do. Simply put, the Act does not address, much less solve, the deep ecologic challenges facing the Gulf of Mexico and its associated coastal ecosystems. Nor does it address the longstanding challenges to the sustainability and resilience of the communities of the region, many of which are tied to past and projected environmental trends in the coast and the Gulf. The Act can certainly improve conditions and create greater possibilities for the future, but it will take much more than RESTORE Act dollars to create the intellectual, civic, and financial capacity to achieve the goal of a Gulf and coast that are ecologically, culturally, and economically vibrant and sustainable. Indeed, it is far more certain that the challenges of participating in the RESTORE Act process -- which will stretch on for some years -- and ensuring that the Act in fact lives up to its promise will put new demands on communities and stakeholders that the Act does not meet in any way. Those demands and the broader demands of creating sustainable communities and environments will likely have to be met by the sort of civic, academic, and philanthropic investment that helped make the RESTORE Act a plausible public investment

What Can We Learn from the 1918 Pandemic? Careful Economics and Policy Lessons from Influenza

Economists and policymakers have turned to the 1918 Spanish flu for guidance on the COVID-19 crisis, and some have been cheered by the example of its sharp post-pandemic economic recovery. Policymakers have also been encouraged to use lockdowns and school closures (called non-pharmaceutical interventions, or NPIs) in part by research showing that 1918’s NPIs saved lives while aiding the subsequent economic recovery. I review a wide range of research to caution that our own recovery will likely be harder and slower because of how the economy has evolved. I conclude by discussing pro-recovery policy that account for post-1918 economic changes

Accelerating the timeline for climate action in California

The climate emergency increasingly threatens our communities, ecosystems, food production, health, and economy. It disproportionately impacts lower income communities, communities of color, and the elderly. Assessments since the 2018 IPCC 1.5 Celsius report show that current national and sub-national commitments and actions are insufficient. Fortunately, a suite of solutions exists now to mitigate the climate crisis if we initiate and sustain actions today. California, which has a strong set of current targets in place and is home to clean energy and high technology innovation, has fallen behind in its climate ambition compared to a number of major governments. California, a catalyst for climate action globally, can and should ramp up its leadership by aligning its climate goals with the most recent science, coordinating actions to make 2030 a point of significant accomplishment. This entails dramatically accelerating its carbon neutrality and net-negative emissions goal from 2045 to 2030, including advancing clean energy and clean transportation standards, and accelerating nature-based solutions on natural and working lands. It also means changing its current greenhouse gas reduction goals both in the percentage and the timing: cutting emissions by 80 percent (instead of 40 percent) below 1990 levels much closer to 2030 than 2050. These actions will enable California to save lives, benefit underserved and frontline communities, and save trillions of dollars. This rededication takes heed of the latest science, accelerating equitable, job-creating climate policies. While there are significant challenges to achieving these goals, California can establish policy now that will unleash innovation and channel market forces, as has happened with solar, and catalyze positive upward-scaling tipping points for accelerated global climate action.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figure

Climate change, extreme events and mental health in the Pacific region

Purpose: This paper aims to address a gap in investigating specific impacts of climate change on mental health in the Pacific region, a region prone to extreme events. This paper reports on a study on the connections between climate change, public health, extreme weather and climate events (EWEs), livelihoods and mental health, focusing on the Pacific region Islands countries. Design/methodology/approach: This paper deploys two main methods. The first is a bibliometric analysis to understand the state of the literature. For example, the input data for term co-occurrence analysis using VOSviewer is bibliometric data of publications downloaded from Scopus. The second method describes case studies, which outline some of the EWEs the region has faced, which have also impacted mental health. Findings: The results suggest that the increased frequency of EWEs in the region contributes to a greater incidence of mental health problems. These, in turn, are associated with a relatively low level of resilience and greater vulnerability. The findings illustrate the need for improvements in the public health systems of Pacific nations so that they are in a better position to cope with the pressures posed by a changing environment. Originality/value: This paper contributes to the current literature by identifying the links between climate change, extreme events, environmental health and mental health consequences in the Pacific Region. It calls for greater awareness of the subject matter of mental health among public health professionals so that they may be better able to recognise the symptoms and relate them to their climate-related causes and co-determinant factors

Violence Against Children and Mental Health Outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: Violence against children (VAC) is a devastating problem in sub-Saharan Africa and a major public health problem globally. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines violence against children as all forms of (physical, emotional, sexual abuse or neglect, commercial and other forms of exploitation), causing potential harm to the well-being of a child’s survival, development, and dignity. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 40 million children aged 15 years and younger fall victim to violence each year. In African countries, violence against children is seldom recognized and the injury perpetrated are rarely reported and managed adequately. Aim: The purpose of this study is to systematically synthesize the evidence relating violence against children (VAC) and mental health outcomes among populations in sub-Saharan Africa, and to propose policy recommendations to intensify legal consequences for perpetrators, and provide support for VAC victims to receive long-term mental health services. Methods: A review of literature was conducted, searching Medline/PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, PsychInfo, EBSCO, CINAHL-EBSCO, Cochrane databases for primary research studies related to key search terms: (violence against children, exposure to childhood violence, mental health outcomes, children, sub-Saharan Africa) involving children before the age of eighteen and in Sub-Saharan countries. Eligible study results were analyzed using Review STATA version 13.0. To provide fixed and random effects AOR to generate pooled odds ratios (AOR) of the association between violence in childhood and mental health outcome, data were analyzed using the random effects model. Subgroup analyses by gender were conducted to identify potential methodological moderators. Results: Twenty published studies (15 cross-sectional, 3 prospective, 3 cohorts and 1 case-control studies) involving populations in nine sub-Saharan countries – Kenya (1 study), Malawi (2 studies), Namibia (1 study), Nigeria (1 study), South Africa (9 studies), Swaziland (3 studies), Tanzania (1 study) and Uganda (2 studies) were included in the review. Overall all forms of childhood violence were significantly associated with mental health outcomes. Children who experienced any form of violence were most likely burdened with depression, compared to other types mental health outcomes. However, violence-type predictors varied by gender. While boys were three times more at odds to develop depression from emotional abuse [AOR 3.17, 95% CI (1.61–4.72)], girls were two times more likely to develop depression from sexual violence [AOR 2.133, 95% CI (1.704–2.562)]. Conclusion: Findings from this review confirms that all forms of violence in childhood have a significant impact on mental health outcomes. Lack of data can hinder efforts to reveal the pervasive nature of violence in childhood. This in turn limits the effectiveness of initiatives to prevent it. Thus, there is need for high-quality follow-up studies, comprehensive social and mental health programs, and supportive child protection services

How economic, humanitarian, and religious concerns shape European attitudes toward asylum seekers

What types of asylum seekers are Europeans willing to accept? We conducted a conjoint experiment asking 18,000 eligible voters in 15 European countries to evaluate 180,000 profiles of asylum seekers that randomly varied on nine attributes. Asylum seekers who have higher employability, have more consistent asylum testimonies and severe vulnerabilities, and are Christian rather than Muslim received the greatest public support. These results suggest that public preferences over asylum seekers are shaped by sociotropic evaluations of their potential economic contributions, humanitarian concerns about the deservingness of their claims, and anti-Muslim bias. These preferences are similar across respondents of different age, education, income, and political ideology, as well as across the surveyed countries. This public consensus on what types of asylum seekers to accept has important implications for theory and policy

Pharmacotic Wargames:Military Play as Ritual Sacrifice

This article argues that the analytic of pharmacotic war can render visible a logic of ritual sacrifice in the US military’s use of games to attract, produce, and recycle war-fighters. Identifying the ancient framing of the pharmakon – a substance or process that functions as at once drug, poison, and cure – it shows how games function paradoxically to draw in, produce, and rehabilitate military life. The article makes this case by tracing the roots of Kenneth MacLeish’s ‘churn of mobilization and demobilization’ beyond the military’s instrumental calculations of institutional self-perpetuation, showing that this churn functions according to a logic of pharmacotic sacrifice that is not incidental to, but rather built into, their routine operation. It argues that (ex-)war-fighters function as a contemporary equivalent of the ancient pharmakoi, scapegoated and sacrificed figures into whom a polis poured its guilt and dysfunction in an act of ritual purification. Though rejecting any linear genealogy or transhistorical Western way of war, it identifies powerful resonances between the ancient pharmakoi and (ex-)war-fighters today. Drawing on extensive interviews with US military gamers and veterans, the article sheds light on the growing influence of games on the attraction, production, and recycling of (ex-)war-fighters in the 21st century. At the same time, by tracing the purificatory expulsion of war-fighters, it contributes a novel theorization of the pharmacotic logic of the US military’s war-making apparatus

Humanitarian Psychology in War and Postwar Lebanon: Violence, Therapy and Suffering.

Drawing on four ethnographic case studies, this dissertation, Humanitarian Psychology in War and Postwar Lebanon, examines the processes of psychologizing suffering in Lebanon from Israel’s invasion in 1982 to the Syrian Refugee crisis in 2012. It is a study of the psychological interventions introduced by humanitarian organizations as a response to war and violence in Lebanon. By tracing the aid ecologies that make specific kinds of subjects possible, this dissertation offers a rethinking of suffering as a subject position contingent on aid and violence in Lebanon. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this study follows the ways in which humanitarian psychology was contested, appropriated and debated by communities in Lebanon. Humanitarian psychology is a form of humanitarian expertise that employs psychiatric diagnoses and therapies to psychologize violence in conflict and post-conflict sites. The first case study addresses the humanitarian trouble in diagnosing trauma following Israel’s invasion in 1982 and the July War 2006. The second case study follows the psychologization process in South Lebanon after the July War, where personality disorders replaced trauma in the making of a therapeutic postwar self. The third case study addresses how new humanitarian therapies sought to prevent domestic violence by treating angry masculinities. The fourth case study focuses on the Syrian refugee crisis that shifted the conditions and relations of aid, enabling new narratives of suffering for Iraqi, Syrian, Sudanese and Palestinian refugees, as well as war-affected Lebanese. My study of the humanitarian psychologization of violence revealed the debates and tensions around violence, psychologization and suffering in Lebanon. Each case study shows a particular formation of aid, resources and care economies that produced specific relations and understandings of violence in Lebanon. The reconfiguration of suffering into psychic injuries depended on different assemblages of techno-moral discourses embedded in humanitarian therapies, NGO-ization and diagnostics. This dissertation also offers contributions to social work practice by providing a critique of the humanitarian trauma model, highlighting the importance of community-based mental health during war. Second, it traces how local social workers in Lebanon negotiate and challenge the work of global humanitarian organizations, as “gatekeepers” of mental health.PHDSocial Work and AnthropologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133372/1/lamia_1.pd

A review on Quarantine during COVID-19 Outbreak: Lessons Learned from Previous Epidemics

Background: Since the emergence in December 2019, the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused a global pandemic that has infected so many people all around the world. As there are no vaccination or antiviral treatment available yet, public health measures play a substantial role in the management of this pandemic. Governments of affected countries have imposed different quarantine policies and travel bans. As quarantine can have many controversial aspects, this review intends to clarify its role in disease control and other aspects of human everyday life with due attention to a couple of epidemics in the past (SARS, MERS, and flu) and ongoing COVID-19 outbreak.   Methods: We conducted a thorough search in PubMed, Research Gate, Google Scholar, Excerpta Media Database (EMBASE), and Web of Science databases and collected all relevant articles to Quarantine in the past epidemics (SARS, MERS, and flu) as well as ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.     Results:  A total of 176 articles were extracted in our primary search process. Primarily, 53 articles have been excluded because of duplication. The other 44 articles have been excluded due to different reasons (Lack of useful information and eligibility of data). Finally, 79 articles were selected for more evaluation (published until April 2020).   Conclusion: By having previous epidemics, including SARS, MERS, and flu, in mind, quarantine and isolation seem to be proper choices for this situation. But, as this epidemy is bigger than former ones, stricter public health measurements, such as serious social distancing and community-wide containment, are recommended