2018 Year in Review
Executive Editor Michael Stein looks back at the best of 2018 and forward to 2019 with the announcement of our new fellows.
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Dear PHP Readers, Happy Holidays!
It’s been an exciting time for us. We are starting our third full year of publication and we continue to grow by leaps.
We published hundreds of diverse stories in 2018, one each day, and sent a week-in-review to subscribers every Friday. We are now read in all 50 states and 150 countries. You can subscribe to the Friday Roundup here.
Our goal is to share with you a wide range of public health topics that speak to the conditions under which we live, the challenges of different populations across the country, and the range of social, cultural, and economic environments that make us healthy or unhealthy. No other single media site finds and publishes the stories that we do.
Our current writing team of superlative PHP Fellows is moving on. Chrissy Packtor, passionate about sexual and reproductive health, is headed home to West Virginia. She will be finding a job working in health communication any day now. In addition to writing dozens of articles for PHP, Chrissy was the driving force behind all our social media this year.
Sampada Nandyala’s roles on the BUSPH campus are many and varied. In addition to being a PHP Fellow, she worked as a Peer Writing Coach and served on the Student Senate as Vice President. She did all of this while studying epidemiology, biostatistics, and infectious disease.
Erin Polka, cyclist and environmental justice warrior, is a part-time student so she will be part of our BUSPH community for a while longer. For her next adventure, she will be working on a community-engaged research project with urban gardeners focused on local food production and lead contamination in New Orleans.
That leaves Jen Beard, our wondrous Associate Editor, and Melissa Davenport, our Managing Editor and arts magician, to hold on until the new crew of Fellows arrives in February: a warm welcome to Oluwatobi Alliyu, Jori Fortson, Julia Garcia, and Gregory Kantor.
Our staff writing is complemented by dozens of thoughtful guest contributors—academics, think tank staffers, community-based critics, technology sector innovators. Those authors took up all the important subjects of the year: marijuana, extreme weather, childhood poverty, bullying, opioids, the ACA, video gaming, the digital divide, sexbots, water quality, the minimum wage, trans rights, good sleep, physical injury and mental health needs, bereaved military spouses, paid sick leave, obesity, homelessness, aging, and so much more.
Our most widely read articles in 2018: women are shamed in jails and prisons for being women; social isolation is on the rise with ill effects; and gun violence seems unending.
Nine months ago, we launched our accompanying newsletter, THE PUBLIC’S HEALTH, to further explore the complexity of the world. You can subscribe here.
We will continue to bring you the issues of the day and engage you along the way.
Thanks for reading Public Health Post and for all each of you do to improve population health.
Please send me thoughts, questions, comments, ideas for topics you’d like to see us cover. I’m at mdstein@bu.edu.
It’s been a great year, and we hope to see you again in 2019.
—Michael Stein, M.D., Executive Editor
Public Health Post goes on our winter publishing break today. We’ll return with our first post of the new year on Monday, January 7, 2019.
Feature image: Paul Iwancio, Thank You, used under CC BY-NC 2.0
