April 1, 2003
GARRETT OFFERS TIMELY PERSPECTIVE
ON GLOBAL PUBLIC HEALTH THREATS
A prize-winning journalist who is one of America’s
premier experts on global health care, bioterrorism and emerging infectious
diseases will speak at 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 17, in the Student Union Jordan
Ballroom at Boise State University as part of the Distinguished Lecture Series.
Laurie Garrett, the only writer to have won all three of
her industry’s top awards — the Peabody, the Polk (twice) and the Pulitzer,
will speak on “Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health.” The
lecture is free and no tickets are required. Free parking is available at the
Bronco Stadium lot, the Student Union visitor lot and on Bronco Lane.
“In light of the current situation, this lecture should
be particularly relevant and timely,” said Helen Lojek, an English professor
and chair of the Distinguished Lecture Series committee. “Laurie Garrett has
written extensively about bioterrorism threats and disease outbreaks around the
world. She offers a thoughtful and thought-provoking perspective on how the
breakdown of public health systems around the world is exacerbating the dangers.”
Garrett, a medical and science writer for Newsday, was the
first U.S. journalist to gain entrance to the former Soviet Union’s virus
weapons facilities in 1996. She has written about the threats posed by the
smallpox virus, anthrax, new “super-bugs” that resist antibiotics, HIV/AIDS,
and the build-up of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq. She covered the
Ebola virus outbreaks in Zaire in the 1990s and has documented how world
globalization is contributing to the decline in global public health.
Garrett is the author of The Coming Plague: Newly
Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance and Betrayal of Trust: The
Collapse of Global Public Health. A longtime journalist, Garrett has also
contributed chapters to books that have chronicled the AIDS epidemic and the
emergence of infectious diseases in the world.
The Distinguished Lecture Series brings to campus speakers
who have had a significant impact in politics, the arts or the sciences. The
most recent speaker was former president of Poland and Nobel Peace Prize
laureate Lech Walesa. On Oct. 9, author Michael Cunningham, who won the Pulitzer
Prize for The Hours, is scheduled to speak.
