Infectious Disease

Articles

Sex in the Brain

Powerful new antibiotics discovered using artificial intelligence. Sitting in a restaurant, staring at a piece of fish. Is it really that expensive kind? Pull out your DNA barcode reader, and find out. And, sex and the brain; women’s and men’s are wired differently; men’s brains are sexualized before they’re born.


Mobile Petri Dishes

Mobile phones — smart, incredibly useful. Life support systems. They’re also mobile Petri dishes! The GPM speaks with a microbiologist who knows. And the roots of the US anti-abortion movement; misogyny, racism, hatred toward immigrants. A conversation with American academic Lauren MacIvor Thompson.


Killing the Future

Killing the future in Gaza. Reducing it to rubble. Forcibly transferring its people into filthy tent camps, or onto the street. Starving them. Hunger and disease go hand in hand. The GPM speaks with Alex de Waal, Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation and authority on human-engineered food crises, and with Margaret Harris, global spokesperson for the World Health Organization.


Dear Mr. Trudeau

Starvation and famine in Gaza. A UN expert speaks out. And, a group of Canadian lawyers demand that the Trudeau government stop supporting Israeli genocide.


Green Planet Monitor Podcast

Powerful new antibiotics discovered using artificial intelligence. Sitting in a restaurant, staring at a piece of fish — Is it really that expensive kind? Pull out your DNA barcode reader, and find out! And, sex and the brain; women’s and men’s are wired differently; men’s brains are sexualized before they’re born.





Covid Apartheid

The A-word seems apt. How better to describe Israel’s national Covid vaccination campaign? Since December 20, Israeli health authorities have administered jabs of the Pfizer vaccine to an astonishing quarter of Israel’s ‘official’ population, while reportedly denying the vaccine to the five million Palestinians living under military rule in the occupied/colonized West Bank and Gaza.


Shit Doesn’t Just Happen

Shit doesn’t just happen. Stock market crashes, multi-vehicle pileups, the collapse of tall buildings, wildfires, viral pandemics … None of these phenomena have a single, simple explanation. Rather, they all result from a multitude of events, factors and situations — proximal, distal and invariably complex. Thomas Homer-Dixon is a complexity theorist. Listen to our conversation.


Covid-19 in Tanzania

As Covid-19 sweeps around the planet, news has focused on places where death tolls have been high: Italy, Mexico, Brazil, the US and — of course — China, where the pandemic began. Early predictions about the potential for outbreaks in Africa have yet to materialize. Whether swift lock downs or non-reporting is the reason is unclear. I spoke with GPM correspondent Josephat Mwanzi, in the Tanzanian capital, Dar es Salaam.


Pandemic Reporting Police

No newsroom is too small to evade the vigilant and exacting gaze of staunchly pro-Israel “Honest” Reporting Canada. The PEI Guardian, based in Charlottetown, received a furious, hateful blast after publishing a letter about Covid-19 in occupied Palestine. Listen to what Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem has to say on the matter.


Israelis in Solidarity With Gaza

As Covid-19 sweeps across the planet, few scenarios are as frightening as an outbreak of the virus in Israeli-occupied Gaza. Four Israelis are refusing to let this happen, and are helping Gazans fend it off. They’ve launched a solidarity campaign to help Gazans out in this most grave crisis — and are calling for an end to Israel’s siege.


Covid-19 in Palestine: An Update

Hungry for news on the state of the Covid-19 pandemic in Israeli-occupied/colonized Palestine, I reached out by Skype to Rania Muhareb, a researcher with Ramallah-based Al-Haq, one of Palestine’s most prominent and respected human rights organizations. Rania spoke with me from her home in East Jerusalem.


Covid-19 in Gaza

As the Covid-19 pandemic sweeps around the planet, attention has been focused on the fate of the most vulnerable communities: those consigned to crowded urban slums, refugee camps and conflict zones across the Global South. No one more vulnerable to the highly infectious virus than the people of Gaza, under comprehensive Israeli blockade and siege for thirteen years.



Drug Resistant Microbes Under Siege

It’s a perfect storm: horrific bone and tissue-pulverizing wounds from high velocity sniper rounds, a health care system crushed by twelve years of military siege, and traumatic wound infections resistant to all but the most powerful and costly antibiotics. Such is the tempest sweeping tiny Gaza, fifteen months after the launch of protests along the militarized perimeter of what gets called, alternatively, an open-air prison or ghetto.