Health and Disease: What Works, What Doesn’t

In this session we will learn about specific tools that an individual can use to prevent disease and promote wellness. We will discuss the use of these tools in the context of the deficiencies of the existing health care paradigm to prevent and treat chronic diseases.

About the Speaker

Dr. Samia Altaf is a preventive medicine /public health physician. She graduated from the Fatima Jinnah Medical College, Lahore, and the University of California at Berkeley, and is certified by the American Board of Public Health and Preventive Medicine.

She has worked as clinician, teacher, researcher and in health policy. Dr. Altaf was Professor of Public Health Practice at LUMS, and Director of the university’s Covid Response Plan. She is member of Board of Governors of GIKI and of Society for Promotion of Engineering, Science and Technology, and Research Associate at PIDE. She was Senior Advisor to USAID, has worked for UNICEF in Pakistan and for the Washington DC, Department of Health, in the USA. She has consulted for the Government of Pakistan, WHO, CIDA, and Swiss Inter-Cooperation. She was a faculty member at the Aga Khan University Medical College, Karachi.

Dr. Altaf writes for popular press and speaks about health issues. She was the 2007-2008 Pakistan Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. where she wrote her book about Pakistan’s health system “So Much Aid, So Little Development: Stories from Pakistan (2011, JHU press).” An Urdu version of the same manuscript, “Tamasha-e-Ehle Karam” is expected to be published this year.