Melvin W. First
In Memoriam
Melvin W. First died at age 96 on June 11. A member of the Harvard School of Public Health community for more than 60 years, First began as a research fellow in 1947 and stayed active in research and teaching long past his retirement in 1985. Working his way up in what was then called the Department of Industrial Hygiene (now the Department of Environmental Health), he ultimately became a professor of environmental health engineering in 1971.
Steve C. Pan Steve C. Pan, MPH ’53 and professor emeritus of tropical public health, died May 21 at age 89. He is remembered as a skilled microscopist, careful researcher, and an insightful mentor to generations of students and colleagues.
Bookshelf continued to patients potentially exposed to these toxicants. Kales is an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Health and division chief of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at Cambridge Health Alliance.
High Stakes: The Critical Role of Stakeholders in Health Care David A. Shore with Eric D. Kupferberg Oxford University Press 160 pages “The United States health care system is broken,” state the authors
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of High Stakes, who turn an analytic lens on key groups that they say are pursuing their own interests at the risk of the system at large. Insurance providers want to reduce their payments, hospitals want higher reimbursements, patients want access to unlimited services, and no one wants to work together. For health care to succeed as an enterprise, groups must align their interests and move beyond entrenched behaviors, according to the authors. Drawing equally from both scholarly studies and real-world examples, High Stakes offers health care leaders the necessary tools to both map their current stakeholder relationships and fashion concrete steps to produce greater engagement, collaboration, and cooperative competition. Shore is director of the Forces of Change Program and associate dean for continuing professional education.
The Reality of Precaution: Comparing Risk Regulation in the United States and Europe Edited by Jonathan B. Wiener, Michael D. Rogers, James K. Hammitt, and Peter H. Sand RFF Press 602 pages Challenging conventional wisdom that Europe has become more precautionary than the United States in risk regulation, this book finds that from the 1970s to the present, there has been little trans-Atlantic difference in the overall level of
precaution. Instead, there have been selective variations in precaution applied to particular individual risks. For example, while Europe has become more precautionary about risks such as genetically modified foods, climate change, and toxic chemicals, the U.S. has become more precautionary about risks such as mad cow disease, tobacco, air pollution, and terrorism. Combining a dozen case studies, a quantitative analysis of almost 3,000 risks, and crosscutting chapters on politics, law, and risk perceptions, this book analyzes the relationship between U.S. and European regulatory approaches and provides comprehensive advice for policymakers. Hammitt is a professor of economics and decision sciences.
Mel First © Sharon Bray, Steve Pan © George Cushing; Photographs provided courtesy of the Harvard Medical Library, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine.
First led the HSPH program in air cleaning for nearly four decades and was recognized internationally for his research and field applications of filter theory, operation, and maintenance, and of nuclear air cleaning systems. For the past two decades, he was deeply involved with international air disinfection research aimed at controlling pathogens such as drug-resistant tuberculosis and influenza.