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

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...
Post a Comment
Read more

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...
Post a Comment
Read more