Didem Özçakır's Quick takes

AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix. Cross-posted from Good Structures. Executive Summary * Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal...

Summary Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first $198k. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step. The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well an...

This week is a big one for the lead poisoning community. The TED Talk I gave in April about lead poisoning just went live, and it's nearly at 100,000 views. Watch it here.  In the talk, I describe a crisis affecting more than one billion children, the toll it takes on their health and futures, and the main sources of exposure. Most importantly, I share our path to solving it.   This momentum did not evolve by...