Newsday writer and award-winning book author to speak on global health

Contact: Chris Pearcy, cpearcy@lanl.gov, (505) 665-3892

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LOS ALAMOS, N.M., July 19, 2001 -- Laurie Garrett, staff science writer for Newsday and author of two popular books on global health, will address "Global Health at a Turning Point" on Monday at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory. The public is invited to attend the presentation, which is scheduled at 1:10 p.m. in the Administration Building Auditorium at Technical Area 3.

Garrett's talk will explore the decline of public health resources around the world, which coincides with a multi-billion-dollar United Nations program this year intended to battle tuberculosis, malaria and HIV in poor countries.

Garrett is the only writer ever to have been awarded all three of the "Big Ps" of journalism: the Peabody, the Polk, and the Pulitzer. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles about the 1995 Ebola outbreak in Zaire, which Garrett personally witnessed. She also received the Best Book of 2000 George C. Polk Award for "Betrayal of Trust," which warns of an impending health crisis caused by poor health care in many countries combined with increased globalization.

Garrett's analyses of public health problems are not confined to bubonic plague in India, Ebola in Zaire, and the decline of public health in the former Soviet Union, however. Her experiences and research into the growing HIV epidemic and its social consequences in decaying U.S. suburbs led her to believe that America's own public health infrastructure is poorly equipped to deal with major outbreaks of contagious diseases.

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