Dispatch from Oslo.

Hei fra Oslo. That’s “Hello, from Oslo,” according to Google Translate.

Yesterday, I was honored to speak at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (their CDC), at a symposium entitled “Science, Trust, and Democracy: Communicating Health Challenges in a Polarized Era.”

This was an excellent event, organized by my hosts Ulf Reidar Dahle and Fernanda Cristina Petersen. It bridged two adjacent worlds—antimicrobial resistance efforts in Norway and beyond (antibiotic resistance being the topic most non-experts are familiar with) and public scientific communication.

This will be a postcard, in two sections. First, some reflections from the symposium. Second, some travel notes.

The symposium.

My talk:

I’d like to share a highlight or two from each of the other talks. But first, I’d like to tell you about my presentation, because it was an unusual one for me. The title of my talk was “Healthcare Under Fire: Navigating Institutional and Public Pressures in a Divided America” had been suggested by the organizer, Ulf Dahle. I had mostly prepared my 45-minute lecture in advance (leaving the final preparation of the slides until the last minute, naturally), but in all honesty, I hadn’t asked an important question of Ulf: Who will be in the audience and what do they need to hear from me? Most of the audience, he said, would be public health experts (inside and outside of government) who were worried that what is happening in America right now could someday happen in Norway. As one of the other speakers said to me, “When America sneezes, Europe gets a cold.” I’d never heard that one. It quickly became clear to me that our colleagues abroad are both worried for us—they are indeed watching our public health news cycles closely, and with grave concern—and for themselves, because they now believe that the same fate could someday befall them. In other words, our tragedy is their wake-up call to start preparing for the worst. They understand that they are not immune to the forces of misinformation or anti-science currents.

So, I basically tweaked my presentation to become a kind of field manual: What should public health professionals and scientists in Europe do to prepare for a situation like the one we are now facing in the US? I described how public health officials and researchers have been reacting to the various attacks on our system over the last nine months. I noted how many