1. TrackerNews: Let’s begin at the beginning with a some background. What was the spark for the iLab idea?
Eduardo Jezierski: The iLab as a concept came from a “melding of minds” across technology and social work. My background is in technology, while our CEO, Dr. Dennis Israelski, has dedicated his career to working on global public health issues, mostly in Africa and China. Although these two domains—technology design and public health—would seem to be quite different, we discovered they share quite a bit in common.

For both, it is important to constantly adapt to changing situations and to embrace iteration. It is a very different proposition from, say, building a car, where you’ve got a standardized set of processes to create a commodity product. Traditional post-industrial organizational styles and practices simply don’t apply. Our shared goal is to push the design frontiers in tech to improve health, safety and development in low-income settings—and to make sure the improvements are real and measurable and driven locally.

We began by defining the characteristics of projects that have had long-term impact:

• Open spaces, neutral “commons”
• Agile planning and strong field work
• Collaborative culture
• Local ownership
• Sustainability through concrete business plans
• A culture of designing for the end user, (which might be a patient)

We saw that the most innovative outcomes tended to draw from a combination of these elements. Clearly, our next step was to create a place that would provide all of these “fertile soil” characteristics for socio-technical work: an innovation lab or “iLab.”

Ironically, I am not a big fan of the word “innovation.” It has become so cliche and evokes so many wrong concepts about how things happen (e.g., the genius character, the epiphany moment, the romantic tale of invention). If you are really interested in innovation as a concept, I strongly recommend reading Scott Berkun’s book, The Myths of Innovation.

The iLab is a place that nurtures innovation, not as a goal, but as a part of the process of doing great work in technology for social good.
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Talk about “low hanging fruit.” Smoking ranks right up there with HIV/AIDs, malaria, TB and flu pandemics as a global public health scourge. In fact, more people die from smoking-related illnesses than HIV, illegal drugs, alcohol, car accidents, suicides and murders…combined. By some estimates, as many as a billion people—two-thirds in the developing world—will die tobacco-laced deaths by the end of this century. There are better, not to mention more merciful, ways to manage population numbers.

Yet for all the public awareness campaigns and urban smoking bans (good luck, Alexandria!), more people are smoking more cigarettes than ever. In 2002, the tally stood at 5.5. trillion, but it has gone up by at least by hundreds of billions since then.

Smoking rates have leveled off in many parts of developed world, but are exploding in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe. According to a recent World Health Organization survey of adult smokers, Russia leads the cigarette pack, with 40% of the adult population puffing their lives away. Indeed, of former Soviet republics, only Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan have shorter average life expectancies.

Recently, the Philippines made smoking headlines when a video of an addicted toddler went viral. With the help of loads of “play therapy,” the kid is now down to 15 cigarettes per day from 2 packs. But his exposure to second hand smoke will no doubt still be considerable in a country than ranks as the #2 market in Southeast Asia after Indonesia.

Few things bring as much “bang for the buck” in global public health as vaccines. It is simply a lot cheaper to prevent a disease than to pay for treatment and the cascade of downstream costs (orphaned children, food for people too ill to farm or keep jobs, etc.) Yet in the current economic downturn, funding cuts have forced even high profile programs such as polio eradication and HIV vaccine research to make some fraught decisions about which initiatives to pursue and which to drop.

Which isn’t to say there isn’t a lot of money vaccines. Sales jumped nearly 30% between 2007 to 2009, from $18.5 billion to $26 billion, with flu jabs accounting for $5 billion, and Gardasil, Merck’s controversial vaccine designed to prevent cervical cancer, hauling in just over $1 billion. Per year.

The bottlenose dolphin swimming the Gulf of Mexico was “splattering oil out its blow hole.” The obscenity of such a thing was too much for marine conservationist, author and founder/director of the Blue Ocean Insitute, Carl Safina,whose voice broke as he told the story in the middle of a lecture at the TEDxOilSpill conference. No matter what BP may promise in its ubiquitous ads, there is simply no way to make something this horrible “right.” But as speaker after speaker noted, BP could start making things at least a little less wrong by coming clean with information.

The TEDxOilSpill Expedition team – photographers Duncan Davidson and Kris Krug, videographer Pinar Ozger and writer Darron Collins – were kept far from the water’s edge by BP’s private security firm, Talon,  whose staff controlled the beaches. When Collins literally crossed the line by stepping over a miles-long orange boom dozens of yards from the water line, he was accosted by a team right out of “Monsters Inc.,” who set about washing his feet and decontaminating his shoes with great flurry and fanfare.

If only there were a rewind button.

From the first, almost cheerfully do-able estimate of 1,000 barrels of oil spewing daily into the Gulf of Mexico to a…

• jaw-dropping 5,000 barrel revision

• horrifying 19,000 barrel update

• are-you-kidding-me? 25,000 barrel recalculation

• and an it’s way-way-way-more-than-the-Exxon-Valdez admission

…the bad news on the BP catastrophe has gone so far off the dial, it has zoomed past “worst case scenario” to “pretty much the worst case ever.”

Dispersants that present environmental issues of their own have only made the situation more complex. “We’re dealing with an aggregation of hundreds of thousands of patches of oil,” according to Admiral Thad W. Allen, the Coast Guard commander in charge of the clean-up. It will takes months to scrub the surface. Years at least to scrub the wetlands.

At TrackerNews, we tell stories by collecting and connecting links. Unlike most aggregators  that are driven by by dateline or popularity, we are interested in context, mixing news stories and research papers, conference videos and book sites, archived articles and blog posts from the field. Typically, between 4 and 6 story groups about health (human / animal / eco), humanitarian work and technology are on the site at any given time, setting the stage for the alchemy of cross-disciplinary insight. Eventually, everything ends up in a searchable database. Day by day, link by link, a broadly defined beat becomes a richer archive, a deeper resource.

Very occasionally, major breaking news stories—a hurricane, disease outbreak, political unrest, climate conference—have taken over the entire site. But the Haitian earthquake stands apart with its mix of staggering devastation, technological hope, massive global response, cascading threats (disease, looting, hurricanes), ecological horror (the fertile skin of  the land has literally been stripped bare from deforestation) and the glimmering potential to right more than three centuries of unspeakable wrongs rooted in the slave trade.

For two weeks, dozens upon dozens of Haiti-related links have coursed through the TrackerNews columns. More have been tweeted via @TrackerNews. Now we have created a special permanent TrackerNews: Haiti resources page. (Ed. Note: the site was taken down after the TrackerNews Project wrapped) 

Waiting for diplomats to resolve the global climate crisis may take so long, it won’t matter. So what do we do in the meantime?

At TrackerNews, we have highlighted all kinds of promising green energy ideas, from micro-wind andsolar textiles to vast arrays of concentrated solar collectorsand giant “sea snakes” harvesting wave energy.

We love them all and their heartening range of ingenuity and resourcefulness. But none of them – or even all of them taken together – can do much to move the global thermostat in the near term, especially without the political will and the investment that results to grow them to scale.

We began to wonder whether there were any ideas that could make a difference, that could actually help stabilize our feverish planet within a matter of years instead of decades. We found five – an encouraging start. Notably, all take their design cues from nature and offer multi-faceted benefits. Nature, notes Janine Benyus of the Biomimicry Institute, relies on technologies that have been field tested for millions of years, the ultimate in iterative design. It works. Every time.

The swine flu genie, now officially out of the bottle as a WHO-certified global pandemic, has left a trail of mostly non-lethal misery (so far) stretching across 145-and-counting countries.

• In the U.K., experts predict there could be as many as a 100,000 cases per day by August – which would also dash hopes for an economic recovery any time soon, according to a new study.

• In Argentina, flat-footed bureaucrats are in the cross-hairs for taking too long to implement protective measures. Now Argentine pigs are sick, too.

• In Saudi Arabia, where nary a pig dares wander, officials are bracing for millions of devout Muslims planning hajj trips this November, advising the old, young, pregnant and those with chronic conditions to reschedule.

• In the U.S., a new survey suggests that obesity doubles the risk for serious flu complications. Exactly why this is so is a bit of mystery, but a mouse study may provide a clue. Fat mice produce elevated amounts of leptin, a hormone involved in immune response. Researchers theorize that the mice became desensitized to leptin, so their immune systems don’t kick into gear fast enough. When their immune systems finally do kick in, they go into overdrive with a “cytokine storm” – a defense so strong, it kills the host.

Last week, the World Health Organization ratcheted up its pandemic rating for swine flu (aka H1N1) all the way to an unprecedented “pandemic imminent” level 5, with a top-of-the-chart 6 considered inevitable. Was it time to wear masks? Stock up on Tamiflu and canned goods? Update wills? Pull out old high school lit-class copies of The Decameron?

Well, no. At least not yet. Plenty of people got sick, but is was mostly run-of-the-mill seasonal flu-style misery. Fevers, aches, pains, head-aches, gastrointestinal woes. In the jargon of the public health set: “mild.”  Yet swine flu remains an imminent pandemic and will likely be once all the cases are tallied up.

What’s wrong with this scale?

Quite a few things, it turns out. But the biggest complaint from doctors (including my neighbor, a hospital administrator at a major medical center in Chicago) has been its emphasis on viral spread rather than  severity of illness.

A week has passed since the World Health Organization convened its first emergency meeting to deal with menacing new flu virus thought to have sickened thousands and killed dozens of young Mexican men. New cases continue to tally up around the world (15 countries so far) and the virus is  spreading person-to-person. The outbreak has been ranked at an unprecedented level 5 (out of 6 ) on the WHO’s pandemic scale. But for now, at least, it appears the world has dodged a bullet. Most cases are non-lethal, if not exactly mild. This is not 1918 Spanish flu redux. Yet. And if it does mutate into something more dangerous, we now have viral “seed stock” and a battalion of scientists working around the clock on a vaccine.

Whew!

So what has been learned by this apparent near-miss?

The most important take-away may just be what a near miss it has been. Factory farms – aka Confined Area Feeding Operations, aka CAFOs – have been royally “outed” as a major threat to global public health. And thanks to the web (Twitter in particular), it is not going to be easy for special interests to duck hard questions and discredit sources.