In the book Twelve Diseases That Changed Our World, Irwin Sherman describes how microbes have impacted populations, altered history, devastated populations, felled great thinkers and, in the process, transformed politics, public health, and economics. He discusses how smallpox, tuberculosis, syphilis, AIDS, influenza, bubonic plague, cholera, malaria, yellow fever, hemophilia, porphyria, and the plant disease behind the Irish Potato Famine have altered history in an informing and entertaining manner.

US News and World Report interviewed Sherman about his book and about What Disease Mean in the Modern World. A related article from Nursing Degree.net’s blog entitled 10 Diseases That Totally Changed the World similarly discusses the ways in which diseases have impacted the course of history.

Jennifer Staple-Clark’s Unite for Sight has put together a web-based curriculum to teach students and practitioners of “global health work” about the historical roots of their endeavors.  Though brief, it should help those new to the field to better understand past global health efforts so that they may learn to improve future ones.

Mission: Aggregate online global health news and resources to promote harmonization

The Global Health Hub aggregates content from around the web (news, blog posts, twitter feeds, jobs & grants postings, calendars, discussion forums and more) and publishes original news and commentary pieces by their own writers to provide a dynamic information portal for the global health community. The Hub is using the open-source, groundbreaking SwiftRiver news verification and sorting platform in a  specially designed format. Once fully up and running, Swift will autotag content, and verify and rank source validity to help users navigate and prioritize the barrage of global health news and information available on the web.

Special features include links to global health jobs, calendars of events, and forums. Many new features are being introduced in the coming weeks and they are open to feedback so write in with your suggestions.

The Global Health Hub is a project of PubHealth.org in partnership Appfrica Labs and SwiftRiver.

We are very proud of GP editor Jennifer Weinberg, who was the theme editor for the current issue of the AMA’s Virtual Mentor journal!   The theme for the March 2010  issue is global health ethics in practice.  Read the full issue here, or start with any of the following:

• Jennifer’s introduction: Global Health Ethics at Home and Abroad
• The WHO Staging System for HIV/AIDS by Jennifer Weinberg and Carrie Kovarik
• The Physician-Researcher’s Dilemma by Hana Akselrod
• Global Health Ethics and Professionalism Education at Medical Schools by Sujal Parikh

In January 2010 PLoS Medicine published a very interesting four-part weekly series on this subject.  I have posted a few excerpts below:

The study had three aims; (1) to advance current understanding of the interplay of actors in the system; (2) to evaluate its performance; and (3) to identify opportunities for improvement.

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The editors of Global Pulse would like to thank The Lancet Student and Speaking of Medicine for featuring our latest issue. We’re proud to work with these great groups, and we’re always looking to collaborate and share with other journals and student organizations. If you’re interested in collaborating with Global Pulse, please email me at sparikh [at] globalpulsejournal.com.