News from the School of Public Health

Anti-vaccination discourse on Facebook increased in volume over the last decade, coalescing around the argument that refusing to vaccinate is a civil right, according to a study published today in the American Journal of Public Health.

Associate Professor of Family Science Mia Smith-Bynum (she/her) identifies as a scholar-activist, harnessing her personal experience as a Black woman and vast research expertise to dismantle racism and improve African American mental health. As the director of the Black Families Research Group, an affiliate of the Center for Health Equity and an investigator with the University of Maryland Prevention Research Center (UMD-PRC), Dr. Smith-Bynum has quickly emerged as a necessary and leading figure in psychology and family science. 

On Thursday, September 17, 2020, the SPH Alumni Network held a webinar featuring University of Maryland alumnus Dr. John Hart, MS '12 (Marriage and Family Therapy), PhD '17 (Family Science). The webinar, "Restoring Promise: Disrupting the US Prison System," focused on the current prison conditions in the United States and Dr. Hart's ambition to improve them.

On Monday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention extracted updated language published just days earlier about how Covid-19 spreads airborne and defaulted to its previous guidance about Covid-19 transmission, CNN reported.

"A draft version of proposed changes to these recommendations was posted in error to the agency's official website,” said Jason McDonald, a CDC spokesman. 

As we recognize September 11th and the National Day of Service and Remembrance, the UMD School of Public Health (SPH) would like to share the public health good they are doing in their communities, as well as the UMD SPH, UMD campus and public health professions.

André Blackman '05 was an aerospace engineering major, but a public health elective sent his life on a different trajectory when he learned how tuberculosis disproportionately sickened Black communities.

“Didn’t we eradicate tuberculosis like 5,000 years ago, why is it still a thing?” he recalled wondering. “The other question is, why for this particular community?”