Last Monday I attended the Bronfenbrenner Centennial Lecture given by, Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for the New York Times and author of best-selling books such as A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity. Kristof mainly reflected on his perspective shaped by years of reporting on global issues including education inequality in China, sexual violence in Cambodia, and domestic poverty, to name a few.

And while much of what he had to say regarding the public health issues that different societies face was not very surprising to me, I was struck by the perspective with which he engaged these topics as a journalist. For instance, he told us that he can see how unpopular many of his pieces about critical human rights violations are, at least among readers of the New York Times, based on the fluctuation in number of people who view his articles. So as a world-traveling journalist, he shared experiences of interacting with people who have been impacted by these issues that many people do not even bother to read about.

One such story that struck me was that of a little boy living in an economically poor region of Appalachia who had a hearing impairment since birth. However, the boy did not receive hearing screening at an early age. This lack of routine, relatively inexpensive screening that someone more economically well off would have easily received, might inhibit the little boy from ever developing verbal communication skills. In other words, the boy’s poverty exacerbated a treatable impairment which could leave him chronically disadvantaged– preventable by simple interventions that should be readily available to all people regardless of their class.

As a Global and Public Health Sciences major, I have been exposed to these and similar subjects in many of my classes; thus, as I listened to Kristof, I thought that he effectively captured many of the salient points of my education in an hour-long lecture including the perspective that public health issues are chronically underappreciated and unrecognized.