Laurie Garrett

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Authority on Global Health and Disease Prevention

Betrayal of Trust: Critical Issues in Global Healthcare

Link to this speaker

Create PDF

Email to a friend

Back to search results

THE LATEST: I Heard the Sirens Scream, a powerful eBook about the continuing fall-out from 9/11, is now available. Garrett also served as one of only three scientific consultants on the new Steven Soderberg motion picture Contagion. Watch a video of her discussing the possibility of the film's plot playing out in reality HERE.

Laurie Garrett is one of America's most eloquent and forceful speakers on global healthcare, infectious disease, and disease prevention. The only person to win the three "P"s of journalism -- the Pulitzer, the Polk and the Peabody -- Garrett makes plain the science behind new threats to public health, both natural and man-made.

She is particularly adept at navigating the politics that help, and hinder, how we prepare, how we treat and how we respond to these threats. A Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations, Garrett is the bestselling author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance and Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health. She has written for Foreign Affairs, Esquire, and The Washington Post, and appears frequently on television shows, such as Nightline, Charlie Rose and Oprah.

She is also serving as a script consultant to Contagion, the film directed by Steven Soderbergh and starrring Matt Damon. Garrett is a former president and now a member of the National Association of Science Writers, and has been awarded three honorary PhDs, the latest, in 2009, from Georgetown University. She is also serving as a co-chair on the UNAIDS High Commission on HIV Prevention.

Select Keynote Presentations by Laurie Garrett

I Heard The Sirens Scream: How Americans Responded to the 9/11 and Anthrax Attacks

This powerful talk combines health issues, investigative journalism, and a personal minute-by-minute account of 9/11 to offer an astonishing view of a dark chapter in American life. A proud New Yorker who heard the first jet slam into the north tower, Garret raises fascinating questions around the World Trade Center attacks, the anthrax scare, and the mental trauma afflicting Americans during, and well after, 9/11. She captures the national mood as it veered from a united political place to a deeply divided anger. By the end of the winter of 2002, she reminds us, the arc had completed, from spectacular unity and confidence in governance to accusations of American arrogance. Through the frustrated anthrax investigations and drumbeats of war, the global community, especially Americans, moved in just a few months’ time from collectivism to fragmentation. Drawing on personal diary entries, and a deep understanding of health and government policy, Garrett's sweeping talk details repercussions of these historic events, transformations of critical government institutions, public health disasters, and, what, in particular, the specter of terrorism meant -- and means -- for the American people.

Betrayal of Trust: Critical Issues in Global Healthcare Based on her international travels to report on and research healthcare, Garrett delivers a sweeping, multimedia talk that uncovers the reality of healthcare in the United States, Europe, Russia and Africa -- providing a new understanding of both the challenges and the opportunities of delivering quality healthcare to the global village.

Climate Change and Global Health: Ending the Debate

To the timely debate over the impact of climate change on human health, Garrett offers this frank, hopeful talk. The health community, she says, is focusing on how climate change affects the movements of diseases, such as malaria. While these threats are serious, we must also look at how other consequences of climate change are already wrecking havoc on human health: catastrophic weather, resulting in flooding, famine and drought, is making sick and killing thousands; we must turn our attention toward preparedness. Garrett shows you where our efforts -- activism, money, policy -- need to go, and how urgently they need to get there.

Bioterrorism: The Modern Peril

It's a thought surreal, terrifying thought: terrorists using bio-chemical weapons. Garrett has investigated both the science and the politics behind international bio-terrorism, and, here, provides a responsible, informative assessment of who is capable, what form it might take, and how likely it is to happen.

VIDEOS

LINKS

LaurieGarrett.com

BOOKS

I Heard the Sirens Scream

The Coming Plague

Betrayal of Trust

ARTICLES

"When is a Pandemic Not A Pandemic?" - The New York Times

"The Path of a Pandemic" - Newsweek cover story on H1N1 Virus

"The Challenge of Global Health" - Foreign Affaris

"Cutting Through China's Smoke" - Los Angeles Times

All Speakers > Laurie Garrett

GAYLE LEMMON at TEDxWOMEN

"If you're going to talk about jobs, then you have to talk about entrepreneurs," says Gayle Tzemach Lemmon. "And if you're talking about entrepreneurs in conflict and post-conflict settings, then you must talk about women." Lemmon is the author of the New York Times bestselling book The Dressmaker of Khair Khana and a Contributing Editor-at-Large for Newsweek and The Daily Beast. She has devoted her life to shedding light on the resiliency of female entrepreneurs, and their remarkable power to reshape local economies. By recognizing and investing in these female breadwinners, Lemmon says, we can help grow economies of all development levels around the world.