Author: Vikram Niranjan, Assistant Professor in Public Health, School of Medicine, Health Research Institute, University of Limerick

lara-sh/Shutterstock.com Cruises are sold as floating holidays, but they are also useful for understanding public health. Cruise ships are carefully designed places where many people live, eat, relax and move through the same shared spaces for days at a time. They show how easily illness can spread when people are packed into a single interconnected […]

What people see on screen can shape what they do off it. When actors such as James Dean and Marlon Brando lit cigarettes in 1950s rebel films, smoking came to signify cool, defiance and desire for an entire generation. Among 12- to 17-year-olds in the US, smoking initiation rose from about 20% in the early […]

CTatiana/Shutterstock.com “House burping” is the latest thing cluttering people’s feeds: short clips of people flinging open every window and door, announcing they’re “burping” their home to get rid of stale, germ-filled air. Behind the playful name is a serious question: does this actually make a home healthier, or are people just swapping indoor germs for […]