Rates of tuberculosis, a disease that thrives on poverty, malnutrition and interrupted medical care, are now among the highest in the world in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea), elevating the risk of an epidemic of drug-resistant strains and a spread into China. This project represents a unique historical opportunity to examine the relationship between food security, malnutrition and the epidemiology of tuberculosis in a present-day famine.

BIOGRAPHY OF VALI NASR

Vali Nasr is Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, Senior Advisor at Kissinger Associates, Senior Fellow at Foreign Policy at Brookings Institution, and a columnist at Bloomberg View. He served as Senior Advisor to U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke between 2009 and 2011. He has previously served as Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and Senior Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

He is a specialist on political and social developments in the Muslim world and is the author of Forces of Fortune: The Rise of a New Middle Class and How it Will Change Our World (Free Press, 2009); The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam will Shape the Future (W.W. Norton, 2006); and Democracy in Iran: History and the Quest for Liberty (Oxford University Press, 2006); as well as a number of other books and numerous articles in academic journals and encyclopedias.

He has advised senior American policy makers, world leaders, and businesses including the President, Secretary of State, senior members of the Congress, and presidential campaigns, and has written for New York Times, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, Newsweek, Time, Christian Science Monitor, Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, and has provided frequent expert commentary to CNN, BBC, National Public Radio, Newshour, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and has been a guest on the Charlie Rose Show and Meet the Press, the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, Real Time with Bill Maher, GPS with Fareed Zakaria, and This Week with Christiane Amanpour.

He is a member of Board of Trustees of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and National Democratic Institute; and has been the recipient of grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. He is a Carnegie Scholar for 2006.

He received his BA from Tufts University in International Relations summa cum laude and was initiated into Phi Beta Kappa in 1983. He earned his masters from the Fletcher School of Law in and Diplomacy in international economics and Middle East studies in 1984, and his PhD from MIT in political science in 1991.

S.T. LEE LECTURE

The S.T. Lee Lecture was established by Seng Tee Lee, a businessman and philanthropist located in Singapore, with the dual objectives of raising public understanding of the complex policy issues facing the global community today and increasing public support for informed international cooperation.  The S.T. Lee Distinguished Lecturer is chosen for his or her international reputation as a leader in international political, economic, social and health issues, and strategic policy-making concerns.

Previous S.T. Lee Lecturers have included John Prendergast, author and human rights activist, the Honorable Robert Hormats, Under Secretary of State for Economic, Energy, and Agricultural Affairs, the Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk, Joseph F. Nye, the Dean emeritus and Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations, the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and Dr. Paul Farmer, Professor of Medicine and Medical Anthropology, Harvard University and Medical Director of the Clinique Bon Sauveur in Cange, Hait.

The Asia Pacific Observatory (APO) on Health Systems and Policies was established in June 2011. It is a collaborative partnership of interested governments, international agencies, foundations, civil society, and the research community. Modeled on the European Observatory of the same name, the APO has as its main function the collection and analysis of information and research evidence on health care systems, policies, and reforms, with the aim of making this knowledge widely available and easily accessible throughout the Asia Pacific Region; it will also draw cross-country lessons and disseminate these in formats that can be directly used for policymaking.

This presentation will trace the history underlying the creation of the Observatory and indicate its objectives, organizational structure, and proposed modes of operation. It will describe the challenges of attempting to bring a wide range of stakeholders together in support of a regional collaborative research effort. It will also touch on ways that research entities located outside the Asia Pacific region might interact with the APO.

L. Richard Meyers was employed by the World Bank for two decades managing teams that carried out World Bank health sector projects and analytical work in a number of countries in East Asia. He directed a team that produced the first comprehensive health sector review for Vietnam, as well as the first Vietnam National Health Survey.  He also led a team that produced the most comprehensive and empirically-based external analysis to date of the rural health sector in China. More recently he has worked with the European Health Observatory, the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, the WHO Western Pacific and South Asia regional offices, and other stakeholders to facilitate the creation of the Asia Pacific Observatory.

With a sharp divergence between justifications for global health funding and the countries and diseases to which funding is disbursed, this study conducts a quantitative analysis of the determinants of U.S. financing for the 171 countries receiving development assistance for health in 2009. The project seeks to identify the key drivers for U.S. global health financing by country and facilitate research on how to make global health financing work better.

The large-scale industrial accident at the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was the culmination of three inter-related factors: external natural hazard assessment and site preparation, the utility’s approach to risk management, and the fundamental reactor design.

The reactor accident was initiated by a magnitude 9 earthquake followed by an even more damaging tsunami. However, it was the inability to remove the decay heat in the reactor core that led to core meltdown and radioactive release.

A review of the timeline of the major Fukushima accident sequences: The plant first experienced a station blackout (i.e. loss of all offsite and onsite power) due to flooding of backup critical emergency cooling equipment. The lack of an ultimate heat sink led to the fuel overheating. Subsequently, the generation of hydrogen through steam oxidation of of the fuel cladding led to chemical explosions causing significant structural damage.

The focus of this talk (presentation slides below) is on the engineering aspects of the reactor accident and the prospects for local environmental recovery. Radionuclide measurements in space and time provide important evidence for the exact evolution of fuel damage leading to partial core melting in multiple units. A review of the spent nuclear fuel pools is given where isotopic water composition and visual inspection images provide important evidence for the condition of the spent nuclear fuel.

While it will be several months to a year before we will be in a position to learn most of the lessons from this tragdy, several conclusions about defensive design, mitigation actions, and emergency response have been drawn by international organizations.

While the public health impact appears to have been low, the economic and nearby environmental consequences are severe, There is no doubt that land restoration will take over a decade and perhaps much longer. A review is given of actions taken by the Japanese government for land recovery in areas such as decontaminating top soil and local farmland as well as highly radioactive water used during ‘feed and bleed’ cooling of the core.

In spite of the economic advances and increases in GDP since the collapse of communism, Russia suffers from a range of dismal public health outcomes reminiscent of a much poorer country. This study seeks to understand what role political factors play in the country's high adult mortality rate and declining life expectancy by mining World Bank and World Health Organization data and examining how Russians access healthcare services and information.

Studies show high levels of anemia, nearsightedness, intestinal worms, and poor health and sanitation among children in China’s rural boarding schools. This project is first measuring initial health and nutrition levels of students in a randomized control setting, then deploying a toolkit of affordable and sustainable interventions in a set of treatment schools that includes multivitamins, eyeglasses, deworming medication, and nutrition and sanitation training for parents and educators. Finally, the project will assess what works and what does not by comparing improvements in academic performance in treatment and control groups. The results of this experiment are intended to inform education and nutrition policy in China at the central and provincial levels.