A Message from the Director:

The past few months have been some of the busiest for the Global Strategy Lab. We have been disseminating our Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics series on antimicrobial resistance from last summer, sharing new research at conferences, and contributing to the public debate via newspaper op-eds, personalized briefings and meetings with federal politicians and public servants. We are making great progress on our research projects. Results will be available soon from our two systematic reviews – one on the effects of international law on the social determinants of health, and the other on the effect of celebrities of health-related behaviours. We have also launched a new project with the World Health Organization on the institutional design of scientific advisory committees, which we hope will inform improvements to how these bodies generate scientific advice on clinical, health system and public health matters.

I invite you to take a look below at some of the work that GSL affiliates have recently accomplished. Please help us disseminate this work through your own channels and please let us know if you have any thoughts or feedback.

Best,
Steven Hoffman
GSL Director

GSL study uses computers to automatically measure news quality and sensationalism

GSL Director Steven Hoffman and Harvard colleague Victoria Justicz recently published an article in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology titled Automatically quantifying the scientific quality and sensationalism of news records mentioning pandemics: validating a maximum entropy machine-learning model. In this study, the authors 'taught' computers how to measure news media quality and sensationalism, which then automatically conducted such measurements on a corpus of 163,433 news articles. The computer's measurements were up to 86% accurate as compared to human raters. Read more here.

Canada and the UN's CRPD

Canada’s justice system often overlooks issues regarding mental health due to stigma or the vulnerability of those with mental health conditions. GSL associates Ali Tejpar and Lathika Sritharan, with GSL Director Steven Hoffman, present a pertinent assessment of the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), and its uptake in Canada in Jennifer Chandler and Colleen Flood’s Law and Mind: Mental Health Law and Policy in Canada. Read more on the chapter here.

CMAJ publishes GSL commentary on marijuana legalization

A commentary co-authored by GSL Director Steven Hoffman and law student Roojin Habibi on how Canada's marijuana legalization plans will run up against the UN's drug control treaties to which Canada is a signatory was recently published by the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ). As Habibi explains, the commentary “underscores the need for a carefully thought out plan for legalizing marijuana in Canada. Abiding by international law may sometimes mean making the call to withdraw from treaty obligations.” Read more on this timely piece here.

Global Health Law Clinic briefs Canada's Minister of Health

Global Health Law Clinic fellows Meagan Dutchak, Caroline Elias, Lauren Geenen and Andrew Paterson briefed Canada’s Minister of Health Jane Philpott, Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer, and the Minister’s Director of Policy on a report they wrote with the Canadian Red Cross, titled “Learning from Ebola to Improve Humanitarian Organizations' Legal Preparedness for Future Epidemics”. This report provides options for navigating five key issues faced by humanitarian organizations when responding to an epidemic: training, communication of risk, insurance, medical evacuation and reintegration. Options focus on practices that a humanitarian organization ought to adopt when interacting with its employees, since employees are owed a legal duty of care that, when ignored, makes an organization vulnerable to legal action. The options were identified by studying the successes and shortcomings of the Ebola response, and are meant to equip humanitarian organizations with the tools necessary to respond to future epidemics in a way that is efficient and that mitigates their liability. Read the full report here.

Oslo Workshop on the Institutional Design of Scientific Advisory Committees

In early June, several members of the Global Strategy Lab (GSL) were in Oslo, Norway, co-hosting a workshop on how to optimize the institutional design of scientific advisory committees with the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH). The aim of the workshop is to push forward a project that GSL was commissioned to undertake by the World Health Organization (WHO). The purpose of this project is to develop an analytical framework and decision support tool for informing the design of scientific advisory committees, especially those that provide advice on clinical, health systems and public health matters like WHO’s panels do. The outputs of this project will be published as a special series of articles in Global Challenges journal in Spring 2017.

Canada vs. Zika

GSL's Post-Bachelor Fellow Gaëlle Groux was the lead author on an op-ed in the Toronto Star on the Zika Virus and Canada

Three ways Canadians can help combat Zika Pandemic

Through comparison of how Canada handled the Ebola crisis, GSL Director Steven Hoffman and Post-Bachelor Fellow Gaëlle Groux explain that Canadians are in a unique position to help the WHO and ourselves in the fight against Zika in their recent op-ed entitled "Why Zika Matters to Canada."

GSL Supports MSF's #NotATarget Initiative

On March 15th, GSL Associates Gaëlle Groux, Lathika Sritharan, Thana de Campos, Trygve Ottersen, Patrick Fafard, and Steven Hoffman participated in MSF Canada's #NotATarget Campaign. #NotATarget is a social media act campaign that aims to raise awareness of the targeted killing of civilians and humanitarians in conflict zones. Read more here, and get involved here.

Highlighted Recent Events:

April 11, 2016: Amy Avis, humanitarian lawyer for the Canadian Red Cross (CRC), delivered a talk at GSL on lawyering in humanitarian crises. Avis drew from her own experience to give compelling examples of how important humanitarian law is on both a domestic and international level. You read more on this presentation here.
March 21, 2016: The Global Health Law Clinic, directed by GSL Director Steven Hoffman and co-directed by GSL Research Coordinator Lathika Sritharan, launched their reports resulting from student collaboration with various public service organizations, focused on solving problems in the global health law field. You can find the reports here.
February 27th, 2016: GSL Research Assistants Matt Hughsam and Hark Randhawa presented their findings from a recent paper of theirs at McMaster's Canadian Coalition for Global Health Research Conference.
February 27th, 2016: A brief educational video highlighting the significant mental health challenges faced by refugees and potential solutions, was presented by GSL Research Assistants Max Tran, Tanishq Suryavanshi, and Matt Hughsam at McMaster's Canadian Coalition for Global Health Research Conference.

SEE MORE RECENT EVENTS HERE

Highlighted Publications and Media Coverage:

Hoffman, S.J. & Habibi, R., 2016. International legal barriers to Canada’s marijuana plans. Canadian Medical Association Journal , 188 (8) , pp. 1-2.
Danik, M.E., et al., 2016. Assessing the Political Feasibility of an International Agreement on Antimicrobial Resistance. S. J. Hoffman & L. Sritharan, ed., Ottawa: Global Strategy Lab.
Dutchak, M., et al., 2016. Learning from Ebola to Improve Humanitarian Organizations’ Legal Preparedness for Future Epidemics. S. J. Hoffman & L. Sritharan, ed., Ottawa: Global Strategy Lab.
Copija, W., et al., 2016. Opportunities for Canada to Improve Global Access to Medicines. S. J. Hoffman & L. Sritharan, ed., Ottawa: Global Strategy Lab.
Gulati, N. et al, 2016. Using International Instruments to Address Antimicrobial Resistance S. J. Hoffman & L. Sritharan, ed., Ottawa: Global Strategy Lab.
Mahendren, M., 2016. Interning in Gambia, I struggled with Attitudes Toward the Death of a Baby. The Globe & Mail.
Groux, G. & Hoffman, S.J., 2016. Why Zika Matters to Canada. The Toronto Star.

SEE MORE PUBLICATIONS & COVERAGE HERE

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