BY NADIA BABAR ’19
As of February 2019, an app allowing men to prohibit women under their guardianship from leaving the country of Saudi Arabia has been downloaded 4.2 million times. Absher is a smartphone app available to citizens and residents of Saudi Arabia, providing them access to a number of governmental services.
BY THEA BURKE ’20
In 1948, the World Health Organization declared healthcare a universal human right. 71 years later, healthcare is currently a polarizing issue within the U.S. government. Single-payer healthcare, otherwise known as Medicare for All, still has a ways to go before a final vote is passed in Massachusetts, let alone in the nation as a whole.
BY THEA BURKE ’20
The U.S. government shutdown had many clear implications for various federal departments, employees and policies. Even though the shutdown may have posed a potentially insignificant risk to public health, it is important to understand which agencies do not function at full capacity when the government is closed.
BY VIVIAN LIVESAY ’21
According to the Ohio Department of Health, Montgomery County, Ohio, had the highest rate of accidental opioid overdoses in the state, with 521 fatalities per 10,000 people in 2017. Within the Montgomery County, the city of Dayton was hit particularly hard by the opioid epidemic. However, according to an article published last week in the New York Times, despite the overall increase in drug-related deaths, the county has managed to cut down its overdose rate by more than half in the past year, hopefully setting an example for the rest of the country to follow.
BY IVY LI ’21
He Jiankui is an associate professor of biology at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China. He has recently claimed to have successfully modified the genes of infant twins, the first in the world to do so. He announced on Monday, Nov. 26 that his team had successfully altered the genes of twin baby girls under the pseudonyms Nana and Lulu, who were born earlier this month in Guangdong Province, according to The Beijing News. The goal, He said in an interview, was to produce babies with the ability to resist HIV infection in the future by disabling CCR5, a gene that enables the virus to take hold.
