How a Curable Sickness Became the Deadliest Infectious Disease on the Planet. 

Geeta Anand ’89, India-based Journalist and Author of The Cure.

Thursday November 2  |  4:30pm  |  041 Haldeman Center, Dartmouth College

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Geeta Anand describes her reporting in India on how tuberculosis turned from a treatable ailment into a totally drug resistant disease. She tells of inhuman suffering in a country that boasts of a booming economy but is making insufficient efforts to bring new medicines to its dying patients. TB is airborne, spread through the cough of someone with the disease, making the air we share unsafe.

Sponsored by the Dickey Center for International Understanding. Free and open to all.

Bio:

Geeta Anand is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist based in India. She is the author of the book The Cure, based on stories she wrote on the biotech beat at the Wall Street Journal about a father’s quest to develop a medicine to save his children who were dying of a rare genetic disease. The book was made into the movie, Extraordinary Measures, starring Harrison Ford.

Geeta wrote two of the stories on corporate corruption that won the Wall Street Journal the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism in 2002. She has won the top business writing Loeb Award for a series of articles on the causes and consequences of the high prices of medicines; the most prestigious medical journalism Victor Kohn Award for her career writing in healthcare; and the Danny Pearl Award from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in 2013 for exposing the causes, consequences and extent of the spread of drug resistant tuberculosis.

Geeta was one of India’s top athletes. She was Indian National Champion and record holder in the women’s 100 m and 200 m breast stroke. She represented India in the Asian Games in New Delhi and the Commonwealth Games in Australia.

Raised in Mumbai, Geeta majored in history at Dartmouth College, before beginning her journalism career at a free weekly newspaper in Massachusetts called Cape Cod News. She went on to cover local government at the Rutland Herald in Vermont; city and state politics for the Boston Globe; and healthcare at the Wall Street Journal, before moving home to India in 2008 as a foreign correspondent. Geeta is married to Gregory Kroitzsh ’87, who runs the Barking Deer brew pub in Mumbai, and they have two teenage daughters, Tatyana and Aleka.