Congratulations to ISG Faculty, Bharat Venkat! His book, At the Limits of Cure (2021) was co-awarded the 2023 Edie Turner Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing.
The study analyzed 180 in-custody deaths in 10 Maryland detention centers and found that about half of those people died within the first 10 days of incarceration.
July delivered an irrefutable argument about the extent of climate change: A recent analysis suggests that 81% of the Earth’s population lives in places that experienced extreme heat attributable to global warming sometime during the month. Extreme heat is not just uncomfortable; it can be debilitating, and even deadly.
The National Weather Service has issued an excessive heat warning for many parts of the U.S. this week. Parts of LA, like the San Fernando Valley, are headed for triple-digit temperatures this weekend. Heat negatively affects some people more than others — UCLA Heat Lab Director Bharat Venkat looks at it as thermal inequality.
Heat preparedness has generally improved over the years as forecasting has become more accurate, and as meteorologists, journalists and government officials have focused on spreading the word of upcoming danger. Chicago, for example, has expanded its emergency text and email notification system and identified its most vulnerable residents for outreach.
Since the time of the Greek physician Galen, knowing what causes a disease has been taken to be a critical step toward finding its cure (an idea we still hold dear in our time of mysterious syndromes and phantom pains). But a cure that specifically targeted the rod-shaped bacterium that causes tuberculosis was slow to come.