Dr. Brita Lundberg, Chair of the Board at GBPSR, believes that advocating on issues of public health is part of being a physician.
Climate talks. Her talks have focussed on the impact of climate change on human health and on the role of fossil fuels as a driver of the climate crisis. These talks draw on data from The False Promise of Natural Gas, co-authored with Drs. Philip Landrigan and Howard Frumkin and published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2020. She has made presentations at the Cambridge Innovation Center; at Northeastern University’s Global Health Summit; at Food and Water Watch, and at the Boston Citizens’ Climate Lobby. Watch her talk on the health impacts of natural gas here.
Nuclear. Dr. Lundberg offered a commemorative speech on the 75th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Newton, MA in 2020. In a 2021 interview on New TV with Joseph Gerson and Sofia Wolmon, she spoke of the adverse human health impacts of nuclear weapons deployment and development.
COVID and Climate. Dr. Lundberg was invited to give Grand Rounds at Emerson Hospital and at 350.org on the public health response to the COVID pandemic and its climate implications.
Environmental Justice and Health Equity. Dr. Lundberg has also spoken out about health equity: most recently, to the Boston City Council, in partnership with several local groups including Friends of Melnea Cass Boulevard, in a successful effort to save 100 trees in a formerly redlined neighborhood. She has also addressed issues of environmental justice in voicing GBPSR’s steadfast opposition to the unjust and unhealthful Weymouth compressor station; to Eversource’s plans to build a large electric substation in an environmental justice neighborhood in Chelsea; and to the planned Peabody Peaker plant, also in an environmental justice neighborhood. She has given testimony before the Massachusetts Department of Energy and Environmental Affairs, Department of Public Utilities and the Department of Public Health.
Dr. Lundberg earned her BA at Harvard College, completed medical school and residency at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Fellowship in Infectious Diseases at University of Colorado. Formerly an Assistant Professor at the Emory University School of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases, she is currently CEO and founder of Lundberg Health Advocates, a patient advocacy group.