Skip to main content

Meera Senthilingam - Four Way Interview

Meera Senthilingam is currently Content Lead at health start-up Your,MD and was formerly International Health Editor at CNN. She is a journalist, author and public health researcher and has worked with multiple media outlets, such as the BBC, as well as academic institutions, including the LSHTM and Wellcome Trust. She has Masters Degrees in Science Communication and the Control of Infectious Diseases and her interests lie in communicating global health issues to the general public through journalism and working with global health programmes. Her academic research to date has focused on tuberculosis, particularly the burden of drug-resistant tuberculosis and insights into the attitudes and behaviours of the people most affected. Her new book is Outbreaks and Epidemics: battling infection from measles to coronavirus.

Why science?

I have always found science fascinating and have always had a strong passion for it. My friends in high school used to find it amusing to introduce me to people with the intro ‘This is Meera. She doesn’t eat beef but she loves science!’. That probably sounds weird to anyone outside of that social group, but it was a long-running intro and does kind of sum me up! (I am Hindu, which is why I don’t eat beef, in case you’re wondering). 

 I was always particularly interested in biology, specifically human biology, and developed a love for understanding the workings of the human body early on. I remember my biology teacher once saying I might not do so well in my biology GCSE and it spurred me on to prove her wrong! Now I have made the subject my career – and I am still passionate about every story and project I work on. Understanding why and how things affect us, and helping others understand this, drives me. Within this, I developed a special interest in infectious diseases because they have this ability to penetrate all barriers and affect everyone equally, and there are just so many of them. There are also so many social and political elements to the control of infectious diseases and how they affect different populations, which are just fascinating.

 Why this book?

 Outbreaks and epidemics affect everyone in one way or another (never more so than right now) and I really wanted to provide an overview of the area and to help people understand how infectious diseases work. The core of any outbreak response is good epidemiological practice – finding cases, isolating them, tracing their contacts and putting them under quarantine. This requires cooperation by the populations affected and their cooperation depends on how much these populations understand about the situation and disease at hand. I wanted to provide this understanding in a short, engaging book. I also care deeply about the fact that the poorest and most vulnerable populations are always the worst affected by infectious diseases and a lot of people just don’t realize how much worse they are affected. I wanted to provide a window into this through the book and highlight that some diseases people think have long gone are still lingering on in the poorest communities, despite having a treatment or vaccine or being easily preventable with good hygiene and sanitation.

 What’s next?

 All sorts, really! I’ve joined a start-up where I hope to deliver accurate, understandable health information to people unable to access healthcare easily. I still love reporting on global health issues, such as drug-resistant TB and developments in the field of HIV, and of course the coronavirus, and I hope to write another book. The current book touched on a lot of topics and I would like to dig deeper into one or two of them in another book to highlight, say, the epidemiology of one disease over time, why it persists, and the personal narratives of people affected. Or maybe the complexities around vaccine development.

 What’s exciting you at the moment?
Well, we are living through a pandemic right now… While that does not excite me, it does fascinate me immensely. I feel like I have written so many features over the years about whether we are ready for the next pandemic, what the next pandemic will be, the horrendous statistics of the 1918 Spanish ‘flu…and now, here we are. Everyone knew a pandemic was inevitable; programmes were set up to address one and yet so many countries stalled when it arrived and just an exemplary few can say they handled things the best they could. Watching the social and political elements play out has got me constantly thinking and reading and wondering what is going to happen next. Thankfully programmes such as CEPI and efforts to plan for Disease X were underway and science has enabled a lot during this pandemic, but at the end of the day these situations are about more than the science. As a science communicator, however, I am constantly looking out for who has got the messaging right and listening to what people have taken away from the news and information they receive. I am hooked.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life.  To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...
Post a Comment
Read more

The War on Science - Lawrence Krauss (Ed.) ****

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier.   It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...
Post a Comment
Read more