VIOLENCE- THE CANCER WE NEED TO CURE

Physician Gary Slutkin spent a decade fighting tuberculosis, cholera and AIDS epidemics in Africa. When he returned to the United States, he thought he’d escape brutal epidemic deaths. But then he began to look more carefully at gun violence, noting that its spread followed the patterns of infectious diseases. A mind-flipping look at a problem that too many communities have accepted as a given. We’ve reversed the impact of so many diseases, says Slutkin, and we can do the same with violence.

Could our culture have misdiagnosed violence? As the director of the initiative Cure Violence, Gary Slutkin approaches gunfire on neighborhood streets as a contagious disease, looking to science and public health for strategies to stop it.

Dr Slutkin emphasized the need to take a new scientific look at violence and use a modern approach to fighting this disease. He has tried the formula and it has shown it is working. Its a new and modern approach to the disease that has plagued mankind from Cain and Abel. In this 15 minute TED talk Dr Slutkin gives us hope making us believe there is light at the end of the tunnel and all is not lost but rather it is just a matter of changing the approach to the disease, an approach worth taking as every remedy currently employed , seems not to be working.