Included in this edition:

1. Come see us at APHA 2026 in San Antonio!

2. Peace Caucus at the APHA Exposition Hall

3. Action Against ICE at APHA: Sunday following Opening Session

4. Please join the Peace Caucus at the Physicians for Social Responsibility 65th Anniversary Gathering

5. Health Activist Dinner

6. Beyond the Battlefields Webinar Series

7. Peace Caucus History Project Update

8. In Memorium: Joy Marshall, MD

9. Peace and Conflict Resources

10. Nuclear Ban Forum: Review Conference Edition
11. Sessions Endorsed by the Peace Caucus
12. Remember to VOTE before coming to APHA!

Welcome to the 41st year with the Peace Caucus at the APHA 2026 Annual Conference!

Across four days, explore how war, militarism, structural violence, and displacement shape health, and how public health can contribute to healing, resilience, and peacebuilding. Our program brings together global perspectives, frontline clinical experiences, and community voices, including local San Antonio speakers and community members sharing their experiences and expertise on the ongoing war in Sudan and immigration detention at the Dilley Detention Facility in Texas.

Please join us at our business meeting on Sunday morning at 9 am. Everyone is welcome! 

Some highlights from our program:

• Global perspectives on health and conflict: From Gaza, Sudan, Rwanda, Burkina Faso, and Niger to Bosnia, Vietnam, and Ukraine. 
• Local voices, global issues: Hear from San Antonio community members and speakers featured in our Sudan and ICE  sessions, connecting international crises to local experiences and action.
• Health systems in crisis and recovery: Explore the challenges of delivering care during conflict and rebuilding health and humanitarian systems afterward.
• Health as a pathway to peace: Examine health diplomacy, peacebuilding, resilience, and the role of public health professionals in advancing peace.
• From witnessing to action: Explore healing, reconstruction, advocacy and approaches to building healthier, more peaceful communities. 

Please see below for a quick glance at our program schedule:

To find the full program details, including speakers, abstracts, and other logistics, please click here. 

We will also be in the Public Health Expo, so please come visit our table at Booth 1546 (see maps below)!

Join leaders and friends of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) and Texas PSR at a special house party during the American Public Health Association (APHA) Conference in San Antonio, Texas. The event is co-sponsored by the Peace Caucus.

Learn more about our work mobilizing physicians and health professionals to advocate for climate equity and healthy communities. Now celebrating its 65th year, PSR welcomes all who care deeply about the health impacts of data centers, nuclear weapons and power, EPA’s environmental deregulation and attacks on climate science, and other emerging issues. 

PSR National + Texas PSR
65th Anniversary House Party in San Antonio
Sunday, November 1, 2026
3:30pm - 5:30pm
At the home of Texas PSR Board President Dr. Adelita Cantu, address provided upon RSVP (about 15 mins. drive from Convention Center)

Learn more here

RSVP here

The annual Health Activist Dinner, held at the  American Public Health Association meeting each year since 1939, will celebrate the importance of political engagement towards improving public health as we gather the first week of November. (During the Covid 19 pandemic, we met on zoom.) We’ll gather at Secret Little Garden, a lush, one-acre private garden estate and event venue in San Antonio, Texas. Tickets (which go quickly) and details are available at healthactivistdinner.org.

The Health Activist Dinner traces its roots to the Physicians Forum, the first physicians' organization to propose a national comprehensive government healthcare system for the United States. The Physicians Forum was continuously involved in the fight for full rights for African-American physicians and other minority health workers. In the 1950s and early 1960s, it advocated for an end to the discrimination practiced by the American Medical Association and other healthcare institutions. Among its leaders were those instrumental in establishing the Medical Committee for Human Rights and Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Debra Ponce, Climate Justice Organizer with Public Citizen, based in San Antonio, will deliver the keynote address. Ponce is an Indigenous Mexican American woman with a decade of experience organizing to support immigrant communities, building strong coalitions, and advancing environmental and local justice initiatives.

The organizing committee* has selected award winners, who will be acknowledged and speak to the crowd. The 2026 Paul Cornely Award goes this year to Hassan El-Tayyab, Director for Middle East Policy with the Friends Committee on National Legislation. The Edward Barsky Award will be presented to Maria Neira, MD, WHO-Director of the Dept of Environment, Climate Change and Health. The Paul Wellstone Award goes to Abdul El-Sayed. MD, PhD, Michigan’s progressive candidate for U.S. Senate. The Paul Ambrose Outstanding Student Award will recognize Elma Jashim, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Students for a National Health Program.

Get tickets here!  

The Peace Caucus, in collaboration with Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), invites you to our ongoing Beyond the Battlefields: War, Public Health, and Human Security webinar series. The series examines the public health consequences of conflict including and beyond direct injury and mortality. Our initial webinars’ focus has been on conflicts in the Middle East, and the health consequences of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. We have explored the multitude of harms to health systems, education systems, infrastructure, food systems, and the environment, and the broader conditions necessary for communities to thrive.

Our second webinar in June, Attacks on Health Professional Education in the Middle East, brought together academic scientists and health professionals with expertise spanning Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran to examine the destruction and disruption within medical and health profession programs at universities, threats to students and faculty, and the consequences for training future health professionals. With over 150 registrants, it was clear there is a strong public interest in understanding perspectives in conflict that are beyond, and perhaps very far from, the battlefield.

Our most recent webinar covered Environmental Health in Conflict: Agriculture, Food Systems, & Lessons in the Middle East. This webinar expanded the discussion to the environmental health realm of conflict, bringing together expertise from Dr. Ahmed Abu Shaban, a scholar on agriculture and food systems in Gaza, a Solidarity Guard member, Nati Hanadari, who serves to protect agriculturalists in the West Bank for the organization, Standing Together. Additionally, Charles Cange discussed the environmental and health consequences of past wars in the Persian Gulf and what these lessons mean for today's conflicts, in particular regarding the ongoing contamination from oil fires in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran and Lebanon. Brian Campbell, PhD, the Executive Director of PSR, moderated the session. You can watch it in full on Youtube here. Sign up for the Peace Caucus to receive notice about our webinars. 

The Peace Caucus celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2025, highlighting decades of unwavering activism, policy engagement, research, teaching, and community building around peace and health. The Caucus has initiated a history project to thoughtfully gather, review, share, and celebrate our history with a wider audience. This project involves:

• collecting and preserving pieces of Caucus history in an archive, 
• conducting oral history interviews with members and collaborators, 
• studying and analyzing Caucus history in a broader context of public health, health professionals, and social and political movements, and 
• developing written and creative ways to share the Peace Caucus story (such as a written history, APHA sessions/events, an interactive oral history repository, photo book, etc).

Annie Cheney is leading the project and wants to hear from you! If you have any records, ephemera (pamphlets, posters, postcards, etc.), or photos and recordings relevant to the Peace Caucus, please consider sharing originals or copies with Annie to include in the archive. 

Questions, contributions, or want to help? You can reach Annie at peacecaucusapha@gmail.com.

Books that may be of interest to our members:

Barry Levy. “From Horror to Hope: Recognizing and Preventing the Health Impacts of War” (Oxford University Press, 2022)

Barry Levy and Jonathan Patz (Editors). “Climate Change and Public Health (Second Edition)” (Oxford University Press, 2024)

Barry Levy (Editor). “Social Injustice and Public Health (Fourth Edition)”

(Oxford University Press, 2026)

Gary Slutkin. “The End of Violence: Eliminating the World’s Most Dangerous

Epidemic” (Little, Brown and Company, 2026). Gary will also be speaking at the APHA Annual Meeting on “Treating Violence as a Contagious Disease: From Community Violence to War” (Session #3143, Monday, November 2, 2:30-4:00 p.m., Room 302A, HBG Convention Center)

November 29, 2026, 9:30am - 5pm Eastern Time (US & Canada) Riverside Church 91 Claremont Ave New York, NY 10027 United States

Today, amid renewed geo-political tensions and regional conflicts, the risks of nuclear weapons use are arguably the highest they have ever been since the end of the Second World War. Yet even as some governments signal new investments in nuclear arsenals and an expanding role for nuclear weapons, a coalition of nations, civil society organisations and international institutions are advancing a different vision, anchored in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which went into effect five years ago.

This Forum is an opportunity to bring together those already working on the issue of nuclear weapons and those who are eager to learn how to change the current trajectory away from nuclear dangers and towards nuclear abolition. The event will bring together International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) partners and allies in efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons and support justice for those affected by nuclear weapons use and testing. Details and registration are here. 

To help you craft a full schedule for APHA, we also recommend the sessions below (although we hope to see you at all of our sessions 🙂)

Sunday, November 1, 2026

2:30-4:00 pm

2020.0 Effects of Racism, Colonialism, and White Supremacy on the Health Status of African Americans

2061.0 “One Battle after Another:” fighting on multiple fronts to defend our right to health and to visualize the road forward to a more just, healthy world

3:00-4:00 pm

Row 9 Epidemiology Section: POSTER SESSION:  Communicable and Infectious Disease Epidemiology I

4:30-6:00 pm

2074.0 Community Engagement to Foster Trust and Participation in Multidisciplinary Initiatives to Advance Health Equity for Immigrants, Refugees, and Forcibly Displaced Populations

Monday, November 2, 2026

8:30-10:00 am

3010.0 New Challenges for Vulnerable Populations

3018.0 Forced Displacement and Transnationalism a Social Determinant of Health Inequities Among Immigrants, Refugees, and Forcibly Displaced Populations

3062.0 Get Up, Stand Up! Standing for human rights with U.S. immigrants; with student activists; with Cuba; with El Salvador; and standing against genocide everywhere

3064.0 Chronic Disease and Environmental Exposures

10:30 am-12:00 pm

3100.0 Promoting global equity and inclusivity: Examining health determinants, outcomes, and systems across the world

3110.0 The Role of Health in Resisting Erasure in Palestine: Perspectives from the Past, Present, and Future

2:30-3:30 pm

Row 16 Global Health & Vulnerable Populations Analysis through the Human Rights Framework

2:30-4:00 pm

3152.0 Emerging Health Inequities Among Immigrants, Refugees, and Forcibly Displaced Populations

3169.0 Human Rights Challenges--Policing, Encarceration, and Lack of Access to Basic Health

Tuesday, November 3, 2026

8:30-10:00 am

4004.1 - Microbes, Politics, and War: The CCDM 2026 Emergency Briefing

10:30 am-12:00 pm

4066.0 Impact of Women’s Health during Times of Protests and Civil Unrest

4099.0 Health, Human Rights, and Ethics in Conflict and Displacement

4101.0 Where do we go from here? A comprehensive overview of the past, present, and future of global health through the lens of APHA’s International Health Section

2:30-3:30 pm

Row 9 Climate Change and Global Health & Health, Human Rights, and Ethics in Conflict and Displacement (Poster)

Wednesday, November 4, 2026

10:30 am-12:00 pm

5070.0 From Migration to Belonging: Navigating Immigration, Acculturation, and Policy

5082.0 Epidemiology Section:  Late Breakers/Hot Topics

A reminder: The Peace Caucus runs on volunteers! Please join us! Your donation helps support our programming at APHA and throughout the year bringing to the fore that peace is a prerequisite of health. We look forward to reconnecting and meeting new folks at APHA!