Humans aren't the only ones suffering from water scarcity in California...Aquatic ecosystems are in serious danger. Recent droughts have exposed weaknesses in California’s water management strategies, and these weaknesses have effects on humans, aquatic ecosystems, and the fish they contain. Droughts are pushing many aquatic species to their brink, including several fish species considered to be biological indicators for ecosystem health.

Experts discuss the limits when it comes to water, and options for planning and allocating appropriately for current and future water demands during debate of a policy position paper written by Dr. Christina Swanson, the Director of the Science Center at the National Resources Defense Council in San Francisco. Her paper, titled, “Managing Water for People and Fish, Now and in a Changing Climate” was debated at the 2016 ISGP conference Water and Fire: Impacts of Climate Change held at and in partnership with Sacramento State University.

For more podcasts, visit ISGP’s The Forum and please consider sharing this episode. Not long ago, tuberculosis was relatively easy to treat: give the patient a long course of isoniazid or rifampin and let the drugs run their course. But non-compliance and other issues have resulted in evolution of drug-resistant tuberculosis, making TB a lethal threat once again. The World Health Organization declared that there were more than 9 million new cases of tuberculosis in 2009 alone. But the reason it's been discussed with such urgency these days is because, over the last few decades, a drug-resistant variant of tuberculosis has emerged.

Learn about how health policy experts suggest dealing with this problem during discussions of a paper titled “Preventing the Untreatable: Why Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis Must be Prevented” from the ISGP conference on Emerging and Persistent Infectious Disease: Focus on Prevention, which was convened by the Institute on Science for Global Policy in San Diego, California, back in 2011. The paper was written by Dr. Timothy C. Rodwell, Assistant Professor in the Division of Global Public Health at UC San Diego’s School of Medicine.

For more podcasts, visit ISGP’s The Forum and please consider sharing this special episode. Antibiotic resistance is poised to be one of the biggest public health challenges of our time, and some experts suggest implementing a global antibiotic use database to address the problem. But with different countries having different capacities for maintaining public health, this would certainly be easier said than done. To address the global epidemic of antibiotic resistance, some experts suggest implementing an international database tracking antibiotic use. What would this system look like, and how could the different capacities of developed and developing countries be integrated?

These are the issues discussed during the debate of a paper written by Drs. Thomas O’Brien and John Stelling, Co-Directors of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Surveillance of Antimicrobial Resistance in Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts. Dr. O'Brien presented the paper, Surveillance of Antibiotic Resistance Gene Epidemics, at the ISGP's conference on Emerging and Persistent Infectious Diseases: Focus on Antimicrobial Resistance, planned and convened by the ISGP in partnership with Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas on March 19–22, 2013.

For more podcasts, visit ISGP’s The Forum and please consider sharing this special episode. You think changing weather/climate conditions don't matter much to you?  Check out the affects on U.S. national security.  The co-hosts of the ISGP's "The Forum" celebrate the 50th episode  with a discussion of international importance: the impact of climate change on national security. Particular emphasis is placed on the role of the intelligence community in the climate security arena.  The discussion centered on a a National Intelligence Council unclassified report synopsis that was written by Dr. Rod Schoonover, Director of Environment and Natural Resources of the National Intelligence Council.  The synopsis, Implications of Climate Change for National Security, was presented for debate at the Climate Impact on National Security conference convened by the Institute on Science for Global Policy in partnership with the U.S. Army War College on the War College campus in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Nov. 28 – Dec. 1, 2016.

For more podcasts, visit ISGP’s The Forum and please consider sharing this special episode.   The indigenous people of northern Canada are suffering from food access challenges, leading to both poor diets and poor health outcomes.  They have moved from the traditional, more wild diets to easily accessed processed foods - with harmful health results.  They need policy makers' help to find land-based food solutions. But if food access improves, will dietary choice follow suit?  Those topics were discussed with Dr. Michael Robidoux, who wrote the policy position paper, Building Local Food Capacity as a Food Security Strategy for Northern Indigenous Communities.  the discussion was part of the ISGP conference, Food Security and Diet-Linked Public Health Challenges, that was organized and convened in partnership with North Dakota State University in Fargo, North Dakota, September 20-23, 2015.  Dr. Robidoux is a Professor at the Indigenous Health Research Group at the University of Ottawa.

For more podcasts, visit ISGP’s The Forum. The WHO estimates that immunization currently averts 2.5 million deaths every year in all age groups from diseases that once crippled and killed millions.  However, countries with ready access to vaccines have witnessed an "anti-vaccine movement" perpetuated by celebrities and popular media. What caused this phenomenon, and what can be done to stop it?  We recap the historical successes of vaccines, the origin of Western world skepticism, and ways to reverse the anti-vaccine trend in a discussion of  a policy position paper written by Dr. David Markovitz titled, “Vaccines: Very Successful, Strangely Controversial.”  Dr. Markovitz is a professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan, and he presented his paper at the 2011 ISGP conference “Emerging and Persistent Infectious Diseases: Focus on Prevention” held in San Diego, California. For more podcasts, visit ISGP’s The Forum. How can we prevent global temperature increases that exacerbate drought and threaten water security? We're going to need more than smart water management to address these challenges.  For our purposes, speaking about drought, solar radiation management could be used as a temporary response to mitigate global temperature increases while we develop other remediation techniques.  Droughts and the impacts of changing climate conditions were the subject of debate at the Living with Less Water conference in Tucson, Arizona, in February 2015 as part of the Institute on Science for Global Policy's Climate Change program.  Debaters discussed Ms. Elaine Wheaton's policy position paper titled “Droughts Challenge Water Resource Management and Policy.”  Ms. Wheaton is a climate scientist and adjunct Professor at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. For more podcasts, visit ISGP’s The Forum. While modern society has generally responded well when new disease threats have emerged, HIV/AIDS remains a persistent public health challenge. In the context of addressing novel viral threats, what can we learn from our past and present responses to HIV/AIDS? Those ideas were discussed during a debate on Dr. Robert Gallo's paper,  “The Need for Expanded Global Efforts to Mitigate Viral Threats: Lessons from the HIV/AIDS Epidemic."  Dr. Gallo, the director of the institute on human virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and of the Global Virus Network, presented his paper at the 2011 ISGP Conference called “Emerging and Persistent Infectious Diseases: Focus on Mitigation”  convened in partnership by the ISGP and the University of Edinburgh, in Edinburgh, Scotland. For more podcasts, visit ISGP’s The Forum.   Perennial crops can be used to produce food while providing ecosystem services, but many wonder whether they can compete with biofuel development. Perhaps a better question is, do they have to? Perennial crops are expected to provide some of the ecosystem services that we need such as carbon sequestration, clean water, improved soil quality, and wildlife habitat.  So what’s the hold up? These issues presented in a paper by Dr. Lee DeHaan, titled “Perennial Crops are a Key to Sustainably Productive Agriculture,” were discussed at an ISGP Conference at Eckerd College.  The conference, Production and Sustainability, was convened April 24–25, 2015, and was part of a series of conferences in which the ISGP teamed with educational institutions to help students understand the nexus of science and policy.   Nanotechnology and personalized nutrition are two proposed solutions to food security challenges, but what's getting in the way of their widespread implementation? Nanotechnology can be used at various food production stages to deliver higher yields and enhance nutritional values.  It can also be used in agriculture via nanofertilizers and nanopesticides. Debaters discussed all this and more during the debate of the paper written by Dr. Cecelia Bartolucci and presented  in 2015 at the Food Safety, Security, and Defense: Food Security and Diet-Linked Public Health Challenges conference held in partnership with North Dakota State University in Fargo.  Dr. Bartolucci's paper was titled titled “Diversified Adaptable Food: Toward Personalized Nutrition.” For more podcasts, visit ISGP’s The Forum.