Teaching war as a threat to public health: the University of Washington experience

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Dr. Barry Levy, author of From Horror to Hope, for help in designing the mock House hearing in our War & Health class. We also appreciate the work of several teaching assistants who helped us improve the course over the years, especially the first TA, who helped us design the course, Arianna Means (now Assistant Professor at the University of Washington). We received no special funding to prepare this manuscript, but appreciate the support of the University of Washington for the course we describe here.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Amy Hagopian

Evan D. Kanter earned a Ph.D. and M.D. simultaneously at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he studied neuroscience and psychiatry to understand how traumatic and non-traumatic memories are encoded differently in the brain. In 2009, Kanter served as national president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, an affiliate organization of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. He has worked at the Puget Sound Veterans Administration as a psychiatrist, and now works with refugees as medical director of the Seattle-area Asian Counseling and Referral Service. He is a clinical assistant professor at the University of Washington.

Evan D. Kanter

Amy Hagopian is Professor Emeritus of Global Health at the University of Washington. She was an organizer of the University of Washington-University of Basrah sister university project after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and published research on leukemia rates in southern Iraq. In 2011, she led a team to estimate mortality associated with the 2003 invasion of Iraq. She also conducts research on health worker migration from low-income countries to wealthy countries and on homelessness, incarceration and other consequences of the maldistribution of wealth and power. Professor Hagopian has long served on the leadership team of the American Public Health Association’s International Health Section, and received the Association’s Sidel-Levy award for Peace in 2018.