Ted Alcorn
MA/MHS Candidate, SBI

Ted Alcorn is a joint MA/MHS student who is now finishing up his second year at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS). In this 3-year joint degree program, the first year is spent at the Bloomberg School and the final two at SAIS. Last May, Alcorn completed his MHS coursework in the Social and Behavioral Interventions (SBI) Program. He is now studying health policy and international economics under Professor Harley Feldbaum.  

In the May 9 issue of The Lancet, Alcorn’s letter to the editor was published. Succinctly combining his public health and political training, Alcorn takes issue with a recent Lancet editorial that called the Pontiff’s statement on condom use and HIV in sub-Saharan Africa “outrageous and wildly inaccurate.”  

In another illustration of his joint training, Alcorn is contributing to a World Bank report on geographic inequalities in the Middle East. His section documents how health care and outcomes in the region vary spatially across provinces or between urban and rural areas, and then considers political responses for remedying those inequities.   

Over the summer of 2008, Alcorn worked in Ghana to help evaluate a community-based system for rural water supply under Associate Professor Kellogg Schwab in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences. In 2008, the SAIS magazine published a piece about his experience there entitled, Getting Drinking Water to Rural People in Ghana, which is available on that school’s website. Findings from the project are also the basis for his MHS thesis, which he will complete this summer.