SPH Professor’s Violence Prevention Program Featured in NY Times Magazine

The violence prevention program CeaseFire, based at the School of Public Health and its founder Dr. Gary Slutkin, SPH professor of Epidemiology and International Health, were featured as the cover story of the May 4 edition of the New York Times Magazine.

CeaseFire is a strategic public health effort to reverse the violence epidemic using highly trained street outreach staff, public education campaigns and community mobilization. CeaseFire is an initiative of the Chicago Project for Violence Prevention.

In the article, writer Alex Kotlowitz refers to CeaseFire as an “unusual effort to apply the principles of public health to the brutality of the streets.” “In the public health field, there have long been two schools of thought on derailing violence. One focuses on environmental factors, specifically trying to limit gun purchases and making guns safer. The other tries to influence behavior by introducing school-based curricula like antidrug and safe-sex campaigns. Slutkin is going after it in a third way — as if he were trying to contain an infectious disease,” Kotlowitz writes. The entire article is available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/magazine/04health-t.html?oref=login