Emily Baltes joins medical mission to Guatemala
Dr. Emily Baltes, MD, a board-certified ob/gyn physician, participated in a medical mission earlier in the year with Guatemala Surgery and Common Hope at Obras Sociales del Santo Hermano Pedro (OSSHP) also known as Hermano Pedro Hospital. OSSHP was founded in 1981 by the Franciscan Order of Friars Minor and provides medical and social services to low-income people. Baltes’ team included specialists in gynecology surgery, general surgery, and anesthesiology. Baltes participated in the mission with Dr. Kathryn Sarnoski, MD, who graduated from Yale University in 2007.
“As part of the gynecology team we triaged patients’ surgical needs and performed 12 major gynecology surgeries. We worked in conjunction with local gynecology physicians, the local house physicians, and medical students from Guatemala City,” Baltes said.
Jeff Cohen and patient profiled in Diagnosis Column
Dr. Jeff Cohen, MD, and his patient were profiled in the New York Times’ Diagnosis Column in July 2023.
The article was titled, “This Was No Ordinary Sunburn. What Was Wrong.” Dr. Lisa Sanders, MD, associate professor of medicine (general medicine) at Yale School of Medicine, writes the popular Diagnosis column for the New York Times Magazine. About the case of Cohen’s patient, Sanders wrote: “His sunburn was itchy, not painful, and lasted an hour or two, sometimes a little more. It certainly never lasted long enough for his dermatologist, Dr. Jeffrey M. Cohen, to see it.”
After sending a biopsy to pathology, Cohen, assistant professor of dermatology at the Yale School of Medicine, had his answer: It was hives — medically known as urticaria.
Daniel Andersen co-authors paper on the effect of conflict on medical facilities in Mariupol, Ukraine
Daniel Andersen and his colleagues published a paper on the effect of conflict on medical facilities in Mariupol, Ukraine. The paper is in preprint and is in the process of being peer reviewed. It is the first geographically comprehensive before and after study of the effects of an ongoing conflict on specially protected medical infrastructure. The study builds off of the satellite imagery damage classification undertaken by the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab. “Through the analysis of commercially available satellite imagery, we found that 77% of medical facilities in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol sustained damage during Russia’s siege, which is a direct violation of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, and two additional protocols to the Conventions. My colleagues and I believe that this work that we are doing is innovative and leading the advancement of war crime documentation. The methods used in the study have the potential to make substantial contributions to the international justice system, the paper’s authors conclude.