Seema Yasmin | |
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 McGovern Lecture 2016 | |
| Born | Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England |
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Seema Yasmin is a British-American physician, writer and science communicator based at Stanford University. She is Director of Research and Education at the Stanford Health Communication Initiative. [1] During the COVID-19 pandemic, Yasmin helped to debunk myths about the coronavirus.
Yasmin was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England and raised in London to a family of Indian and Burmese ancestry. [2] [3] [4] Her mother, Yasmin Halima, was born in India and is a Distinguished Careers Institute fellow who works on women's health. [5] At the age of seventeen, Yasmin decided that she wanted to take her mother's first name as her surname, and had her name changed with a lawyer. [5] Yasmin trained in biochemistry at Queen Mary University of London and graduated in 2005. [6] She moved to the University of Cambridge to complete a graduate programme in medicine. [7] She started her medical career in the National Health Service, working at Homerton University Hospital for one year. In 2010 Yasmin was awarded a University of California, Los Angeles fellowship to train in clinical research in Botswana. [8] She moved to the United States with her mother. [5] In 2011, Yasmin joined the Epidemic Intelligence Service [9] as a "disease detective" at the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where she studied outbreaks of disease in prisons, border towns and American Indian reservations. [10] Whilst studying an outbreak of flesh-eating bacteria on the Navajo Nation, Yasmin realised the power of effective science communication, and realised that she wanted to use journalism to shift public policy. [5]
In 2013 Yasmin was made a Dalla Lana Global Journalism Fellow at the University of Toronto. [11] Here she focussed on telling the stories of epidemics in an effort to encourage others to learn from tragedy. [12] Soon after completing her fellowship, Yasmin joined The Dallas Morning News as a reporter. [7] [13] Her work there included coverage of the Ebola crisis in Dallas and the epidemic of gun violence in the US. [14] [15] She was a medical analyst for CNN, and had a weekly medical segment on television news partner NBC 5 DFW. [7] She held a simultaneous position as Professor of Public Health at the University of Texas at Dallas. [16] [8] Yasmin delivered the 2016 University of Texas at Austin McGovern Lecture, where she discussed the lessons she had learned reporting from public health emergencies. [17]
Yasmin joined Stanford University as a John S. Knight Fellow in 2017. There she investigated the spread of misinformation and pseudoscience during epidemics. [18] As part of this fellowship, Yasmin started working with Wired to debunk pseudoscience and misinformation on YouTube. She delivered a talk at the TEDx OakLawn event in 2018. In 2019 Yasmin was appointed as Director of the Stanford University Health Communication Initiative. [5]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Yasmin used social media, podcasts, [19] and popular science articles to better inform the public about the coronavirus disease. [20] [21] [22] She is also interested in the "spread of myths and hoaxes and rumors and outright lies about vaccines". [23] Yasmin became one of the most trusted public health experts on social media. [24] She used webinars to teach students about how to report responsibly on medical emergencies. [25] [26] In an interview with Bumble, Yasmin explained how to date during the pandemic. [27] A collection of her essays on health and medical misinformation from her newspaper column “Debunked” was published in 2021 as Viral BS : medical myths and why we fall for them. [28]
Her second book, Muslim Women Are Everything, started as a conversation on Twitter and ended as a six-figure book deal. [29]
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Laurie Garrett is an American science journalist and author. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1996 for a series of works published in Newsday that chronicled the Ebola virus outbreak in Zaire.
Luciana Borio is a Brazilian-American infectious disease physician and public health administrator. She is a vice president at In-Q-Tel. She previously served as director for Medical and Biodefense Preparedness at the National Security Council, acting chief scientist of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), assistant commissioner for counterterrorism policy of the FDA, and director of FDA's Office of Counterterrorism and Emerging Threats. She is known for her work advancing clinical trials, the development of medical countermeasures for health emergencies, and the public health responses to Ebola and Zika outbreaks.
A public health emergency of international concern is a formal declaration by the World Health Organization (WHO) of "an extraordinary event which is determined to constitute a public health risk to other States through the international spread of disease and to potentially require a coordinated international response", formulated when a situation arises that is "serious, sudden, unusual, or unexpected", which "carries implications for public health beyond the affected state's national border" and "may require immediate international action". Under the 2005 International Health Regulations (IHR), states have a legal duty to respond promptly to a PHEIC. The declaration is publicized by an IHR Emergency Committee (EC) of international experts, which was developed following the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak.
Four laboratory-confirmed cases of Ebola virus disease occurred in the United States in 2014. Eleven cases were reported, including these four cases and seven cases medically evacuated from other countries. The first was reported in September 2014. Nine of the people contracted the disease outside the US and traveled into the country, either as regular airline passengers or as medical evacuees; of those nine, two died. Two people contracted Ebola in the United States. Both were nurses who treated an Ebola patient; both recovered.
In 2014, Ebola virus disease in Spain occurred due to two patients with cases of the disease contracted during the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa; they were medically evacuated. A failure in infection control in the treatment of the second patient led to an isolated infection of Ebola virus disease in a health worker in Spain itself. The health worker survived her Ebola infection, and has since been declared infection-free.
Céline R. Gounder is an American physician and medical journalist who specializes in infectious diseases and global health. She was a member of the COVID-19 Advisory Board transition team of then-incoming U.S. president Joe Biden. In 2022, she joined the Kaiser Family Foundation as senior fellow and editor-at-large for public health at Kaiser Health News.
Dr. Daniel R. Lucey is an American physician, researcher, clinical professor of medicine of infectious diseases at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, and a research associate in anthropology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, where he has co-organised an exhibition on eight viral outbreaks.
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Syra Madad is an American pathogen preparedness expert and infectious disease epidemiologist. Madad is the Senior Director of the System-wide Special Pathogens Program at NYC Health + Hospitals where she is part of the executive leadership team which oversees New York City's response to the Coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in the city's 11 public hospitals. She was featured in the Netflix documentary series Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak and the Discovery Channel documentary The Vaccine: Conquering COVID.
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Maria DeJoseph Van Kerkhove is an American infectious disease epidemiologist. With a background in high-threat pathogens, Van Kerkhove specializes in emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases and is based in the Health Emergencies Program at the World Health Organization (WHO). She is the technical lead of COVID-19 response and the head of emerging diseases and zoonosis unit at WHO.
Nahid Bhadelia is an American infectious-diseases physician, founding director of Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Policy and Research (CEID) at Boston University and an associate professor at the Boston University School of Medicine. She served as the Senior Policy Advisor for Global COVID-19 Response on the White House COVID-19 Response Team.
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