Ensia articles

When you look to the year ahead, what do you see? Ensia recently invited eight global thought leaders to share their thoughts. In this interview Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, responds to three questions: What will be the biggest challenge to address or opportunity to grasp in your field in 2017? Why? And what should we be doing about it now?

Considering the parallel rise in

The rise in recent decades of diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis suggests that factors in the environment are contributing.

In 1932, New York gastroenterologist Burrill Crohn described an unusual disease in 14 adults. The patients had bouts of abdominal pain, bloody diarrhea, and lesions and scars on the bowel wall. Doctors in other parts of North America and Europe were seeing it in their patients, too. They called the rare condition

It’s time for the health care industry to raise its voice on climate change

The new Clean Power Plan, stunning in its audacity, will undoubtedly face many hurdles in the coming years. Yet already it has achieved something no other major climate initiative has been able to do. It has reframed the climate conversation to put the focus squarely on the health of humans.

Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard of links between a warming clima

You’ve probably noticed how being around trees, grass and flowers can make you feel better. Now, evidence is mounting that the presence of green and growing things is associated with being healthier, too.

Reporting at Journalist’s Resource, Justin Feldman

We see this technique play out all the time in the environmental movement — and both roles are essential.

The ol’ good cop/bad cop shtick: One of the oldest techniques in the book and a cinematic trope that’s been used for decades. It has stuck around because it’s melodramatic and it kind of works. While this routine may be playing out right now in some sparsely decorated interrogation room or on a big screen near you, the more surprising are