Article published in Real Change July 7, 2010 by Robin Lindley. “What if more of us saw war as a global health problem? “

Eric Becker filmed this 3-minute short of the conference. He interviewed conference organizers, head of Physicians for Social Responsibility, and others. To view it, click here.

Kevin Sites discusses the lessons he learned as a war correspondent for major TV networks and Yahoo News. Sites believes American media and society as a whole focus on only the most narrow part of war – combat – while ignoring collateral damage that affects civilians for generations.

Maggi Little, a panelist at the Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons, remembered a woman giving birth on the road as she marched from Kosovo to Macedonia. Nobody stopped to help, nobody did anything except keep walking. 
Little and her family fled from the conflicts in the Balkans during the 1990s. Now she lives in Seattle, where [...]

Peter Sessum, a global health reporting student at UW offers the following opinion on a pre-conference session, “Expanding the Definition of War.”
I wonder how University of Wisconsin-Madison professorand torture expert Alfred McCoy, PhD,  would feel if we took one idea from his books that represent his entire philosophy? Books are long because they represent complex [...]

What if you couldn’t go the store? What if you couldn’t go to the mall? Or what if going to Pike Place Market caused you to tremble and panic because the sights, the sounds or the smells reminded you of a moment when the bomb had gone off and a comrade or a woman or [...]

To begin his discussion of the role law plays in international human rights protection, Professor Joel Ngugi of the UW School of Law asked the audience if the right to health even existed. His answer was a resounding “Yes!” and he proceeded to expound upon the legal call-to-action faced by the global society of today.

Three clinicians from the Puget Sound Veterans Administration discuss the medical treatment of veterans and the way they address these issues Saturday afternoon.
Julia Sewell’s lecture on Military Sexual Trauma (MST) was particularly enlightening for the audience. Due to the military culture and environment that military service members find themselves in, the challenges with MST can [...]

The speakers at this breakout session discussed the impacts of war on the ecosystem and the rise of childhood leukemia in Iraq.
Gordon Thompson, executive director of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies, presented  the idea that healthy people and a happy biosphere are a necessary combination to protect the ecosystem. He explained that even though [...]

A few minutes into her presentation, Melanie Sears from the Center of Nonviolent Communication had a jackal puppet on her hand.
Jackals, she said while gesturing with the puppet, express their feelings with judgment and blame.
She then took off the jackal and replaced it with a giraffe.
Now giraffes, Sears said, express their feelings in terms of [...]