The Tattoos of Human Trafficking and Vaccinating the World's Children
November 15, 2024
Editors' Note
An estimated 28 million people worldwide are victims of human trafficking, exploited for labor, services, and commercial sex. To shed light on the efforts to combat that modern slavery, Harvard dermatologist Shadi Kourosh and Mark P. Lagon, chief policy officer at Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, discuss how medical encounters can serve as interventions for victims, and the roles health-care workers can play in identifying tattoos that signal an individual is being trafficked.
Next, Carlos Javier Regazzoni, director of the Argentine Council on Foreign Relations' global health and human security committee, outlines how artificial intelligence (AI) has the power to transform Latin America's health systems, but warns that fiscal constraints and limited information-technology capacities could impede progress.
Shifting to the movement of pathogens, Anita Shet and Rose Weeks from Johns Hopkins University, explain how war, vaccine misinformation, and pandemic-related health-care disruptions are contributing to a rise in U.S. measles cases. To reverse that trend in an interconnected world, public health officials should focus vaccination campaigns on children in war-torn countries as well as those in the United States.
To wrap up the issue, Kavya Shah and Rebecca Katz from Georgetown University unpack how India's historic commitment to LMICs' interests and its growing pharmaceutical industry will inform its role as a global health power.
Until next week!—Nsikan Akpan, Managing Editor, and Caroline Kantis, Associate Editor
Partnerships among the medical community, state agencies, and nongovernmental organizations can tap opportunities to intervene and gather public health data
