Social Media

Stay up-to-date with the latest news and events by following Weill Cornell Medicine on social media. You’ll find a variety of posts covering healthcare news, research breakthroughs and education on each platform. Our feeds also include updates from faculty, students, departments, institutes, centers, units and other groups, which you can follow in turn. Just look for the “WCM” icon!

Users who interact with any social media property of Weill Cornell Medicine are bound by the Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell University social media policies, see links at right. It is important to note that these guidelines may be applicable for employees outside of work and other users when making reference to Weill Cornell Medicine.

Instructions for Weill Cornell Medicine faculty, staff and students about WCM social media registration & internal policy.

WCM Social Media Guidelines

Cornell University Policy 4.16, "University Social Media Accounts"

Twitter

Tweets by @WeillCornell

Facebook

Weill Cornell Medicine

Instagram

The students of Weill Cornell Medicine stand in solidarity with survivors of sexual violence everywhere. April 25th marks Denim Day, an international campaign to raise awareness about sexual assault and the misconceptions that surround it. This movement was sparked by an Italian Supreme Court case where judges overturned a rape conviction because they felt the survivor's jeans were too tight. The next day, women in the Italian Parliament wore jeans in protest.
Today, WCM students led by Do No Harm, the anti-sexual violence student group, wore their jeans and white coats as future healthcare providers to commit themselves to survivors. #DenimDay #DoNoHarm #SAAM #CareDiscoverTeach #WeillCornellMedicine

Dr. Elizabeth Ross has an enduring passion for improving patients’ lives by studying how genes affect the brain’s function. Watch the video for this story via the link in our bio. “Having the privilege of working with families, hearing the challenges that they face as they move on in their life story, is very motivating,” said Dr. Ross, the Nathan Cummings Professor in Neurology, director of the Center for Neurogenetics and professor of neuroscience in the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute at Weill Cornell Medicine, and chair of the Neuroscience Graduate Program at the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences. “It keeps us engaged in trying to find answers for them.” #WeAreWCM
#neurology #CareDiscoverTeach #WeillCornellMedicine

I believe that we physicians can change the world.
As an ophthalmologist, I feel privileged to have the opportunity to help people see again. Far too many people in the world suffer from blindness that can be cured with the right training, equipment, and personnel. After graduating from @stanford, I began my journey in international health in the @peacecorps, serving as a health worker in a small mountain town in Nicaragua. I left that experience with deep conviction in the critical role that medicine can play in people’s lives, especially in countries with the least resources. That led me to Weill Cornell Medicine, an institution with many opportunities to serve communities abroad.
Ten years ago, I was part of a team that founded the East African Eye Project, focused on improving sight and lives in Tanzania by both caring for patients directly and training the Tanzanian people to serve their own communities. Over the last decade, I’ve helped lead teams of U.S. doctors, partnering with Tanzanian NGOs and governmental organizations to screen approx. 8,000 patients, ultimately performing roughly 1200 cataract and other surgeries to restore sight.
The results have often been dramatic. When the eye patch comes off, and a patient can see again – you just don’t have too many opportunities in life to witness that kind of joy in such a short timeframe. Patients are singing, dancing, crying, some seeing their families for the first time, many knowing that their livelihoods will no longer be threatened because they cannot see well enough to work.
It feels like a small miracle each time.
Dr. Grace Sun is the Director of the Ophthalmology Clinical Practice at Weill Cornell Medicine - Lower Manhattan, the Residency Program Director at Weill Cornell Ophthalmology, an Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology at Weill Cornell Medicine and Assistant Attending Ophthalmologist @nyphospital. #WeAreWCM
#eyedoctor #globalhealth #globaleducation #ophthalmology #peacecorps #CareDiscoverTeach #WeillCornellMedicine

Haitians with HIV are living longer, and that improved survival rate hasn’t only benefited those with the disease. It’s also bettered the lives of their children—and their children’s children. Still, Dr. McNairy points out, “HIV, like other sexually transmitted diseases, affects primarily adults 16 to 60, who are the economic workforce of a country.” Now that Haiti has a healthier population, many patients who come to GHESKIO’s clinic are focused on how to earn a living in a nation with massive unemployment. “They’re saying, ‘Doc, I feel well now. Can you find me a job?’” says Dr. Pape.
So GHESKIO has jumped into the breach with programs intended to prepare clients for work. Since 2005, the group has run a microcredit fund that has benefited more than 5,000 women living with or vulnerable to HIV/AIDS, offering loans to support small business activities such as selling second-hand clothes or fast food. A 2009 paper written by Dr. Pape and his colleagues found that 87 percent of loan recipients reported better living conditions afterwards, including being able to pay for food and rent.
Following the 2010 earthquake, GHESKIO also built a vocational school on its Port-au-Prince campus to train young men in trades like construction. After getting their diplomas, all of those graduates found work and were able to leave their impoverished neighborhoods. Three years later, the training center began recruiting female sex workers and rape victims who were patients at GHESKIO’s clinic to learn skills like furniture making.
Dr. Daniel Fitzgerald, director of the Center for Global Health at WCM, points out that the training provides economic empowerment as well as a public health benefit. “Even an incremental change,” he says, “can have a big impact.” #GHESKIO #GlobalHealth #HIV #AIDS

Dr. McNairy is working with Dr. Rouzier and her colleagues on new ways to increase testing among vulnerable youngsters. A few years ago, #GHESKIO ran a community-based campaign in seven impoverished neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince, setting up booths that offered a package of healthcare services for 10 to 24-year-olds, including same-day testing for HIV, STDs, and pregnancy and screening for tuberculosis. This way, #HIV/#AIDS wasn’t singled out for testing—and the strategy worked. Of 3,425 young people, 98 percent agreed to an HIV test.
Teens who tested positive were taken to GHESKIO’s HIV clinic for treatment and counseling. Rather than continuing to see each patient individually at the main adolescent clinic, GHESKIO established a branch at a local community center, where groups of five to eight youths would meet every month for check-ups by a nurse and to receive support from their peers. “It decreased the stigma and normalized having the disease,” says Dr. McNairy. “And it created this incredible surrogate family that provided much-needed social support and a sense of belonging.” Preliminary outcomes from the program are promising. Dr. McNairy says that 90 percent of participants were still in care for a year after they tested positive, compared to only half of those youngsters seen at GHESKIO’s main clinic. Her team recently received a $2 million, four-year NIH grant—entitled FANMI, Creole for “family”—to further study the effectiveness of a community-based peer group strategy in a randomized clinical trial.

Overall, Dr. Pape says, there are currently more than 80,000 people in Haiti receiving treatment—one-third of them through the GHESKIO network—and he expects more potent new drugs to soon become available. Moving forward, the programs in Haiti can be an especially helpful model for other underdeveloped places around the globe. “This work isn’t a Band-Aid solution to ending the HIV epidemic,” says Dr. McNairy. “We’re making a real difference.

Still, the crisis is far from over. Yes, infection rates have been falling, but the country still leads Latin America and the Caribbean region with the most overall cases of #HIV and #AIDS-related deaths. Among the hardest to reach are 10 to 24-year-olds, particularly girls and young women. According to @unaidsglobal, adolescents and youth account for 40 percent of new #HIV infections every year around the world, with deaths among that group having increased by 50 percent over the last decade. “Adolescents are a highly vulnerable group that has been neglected in the past with little dedicated interventions for them,” says Dr. Vanessa Rouzier, #GHESKIO’s head of pediatrics and nutrition. “We now recognize that we urgently need adolescent specific strategies to help these vulnerable youth cope and thrive with this disease, as well as prevent new infections in that group.

Dr. Rouzier oversees #Haiti’s largest pediatric #AIDS clinic; since joining GHESKIO in 2009, she has noticed a dramatic reduction in the number of babies infected at birth, which she attributes to more support programs for pregnant women and an increased number of HIV-positive mothers on antiretroviral medication. “If we want to end the AIDS epidemic, we need to have everyone on board—not only adults but adolescents and children as well,” says Dr. Rouzier. “Different age groups need different strategies.” #GlobalHealth

The free treatment program funded by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria proved highly successful: in a study published in 2016 in NEJM, investigators at #GHESKIO and WCM reported that more than two-thirds of the initial patients enrolled were still alive a decade later, about the same survival rate as their counterparts in the U.S. “It’s had a Lazarus effect,” says co-author Dr. Jean Pape (MD ’75), who has directed GHESKIO since its founding in 1982. “These people have gone from certain death to actually leading a fairly normal life.” More than half of the patients in the program already had full-blown #AIDS by the time they started taking antiretrovirals. Plus, many were malnourished, suffering from other opportunistic infections like tuberculosis and living on less than $1 a day. “These people were incredibly, incredibly ill,” says senior author Dr. Margaret McNairy, the Bonnie Johnson Sacerdote Clinical Scholar in Women’s Health and an assistant professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine.

Yet Dr. Pape notes that before the global health initiative was created in 2003, some prominent scientists argued that antiretrovirals should not be given to patients in the developing world, citing concerns with lack of adherence to the complex regiment. “As it turned out,” says Dr. Pape, “that was not true at all.” In fact, compliance was higher than anticipated.

Ten years later, investigators found that about 70 percent of patients had survived—a mortality rate comparable to Americans who started antiretroviral therapy when it began in the 90s. “Sick people desperately want to get better,” says Dr. McNairy. #GlobalHealth

At what is thought to be the world’s oldest #HIV/#AIDS clinic, based in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince and led by Dr. Jean William Pape, clinicians recently interviewed some longtime patients with the disease—one that’s all too common in the Caribbean nation, which has the highest infection rate in the Western Hemisphere. Among the survivors was a mother who spoke proudly of living to see her daughter attend university. Another rejoiced at being able to celebrate her grandchild’s First Holy Communion. And yet another shared plans to take a pharmacology class, with the dream of opening a drugstore one day.

Years ago, all that would have been nearly impossible for most Haitians with AIDS. Back when these patients were first diagnosed, HIV-fighting drugs weren’t available in the impoverished country, so doctors expected many to die within 12 months. But in early 2003, the Haitian Study Group on Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections—a nonprofit known as #GHESKIO (its French acronym) that provides in partnership with Haiti’s Ministry of Health and the WCM Center for Global Health—obtained funding from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to start a free treatment program for those with the illness. Over the next year, more than 1,000 adults began antiretroviral therapy, a combination of drugs that suppresses the virus and reduces the risk of transmission—and they were among the first to receive such lifesaving medication in a developing nation. #GlobalHealth

In honor of @who designed #WorldHealthDay, we begin a four-part series on #GHESKIO, a WCM-affiliated clinic in #Haiti that has seen remarkable results in treating and preventing #HIV and #AIDS in the country.
Keep following next week as we post images and stories about the clinic and how it’s efforts have created greater social benefits in the community. Click on the link in our bio for the full feature story from Weill Cornell Medicine Magazine, Vol. 16, No. 4. #GlobalHealth

Photos credit: Bahare Khodabande

Watch the video for this story via the link in our bio.
For Dr. Ernie Esquivel, director of Weill Cornell Medical College’s internal medicine clerkship, there are few things more gratifying than watching medical students succeed in their training. “When I see a student being able to do something that they couldn’t even imagine doing, that transformation, to me, is an incredible experience,” said Dr. Esquivel, an assistant professor of clinical medicine and a hospitalist at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. “At Weill Cornell Medicine and @nyphospital, I find myself surrounded with all these medical students who’ve achieved great things. And to be instrumental to that growth is what sustains me.” #WeAreWCM
#internalmedicine #hcsm #meded #CareDiscoverTeach #WeillCornellMedicine

On #NationalDoctorsDay we celebrate and are thankful for all our physicians, researchers & doctors-to-be, and those of our partners @nyphospital, @sloankettering, @rockefelleruniv, @hspecialsurgery
In these photos: Dr. Robert Kim, Dr. Adrienne Phillips, Dr. Howard Fine, and the Class of 2021 #CareDiscoverTeach #WeAreWCM

A reminder today that gun violence is a public health issue.

The medical students of Weill Cornell Medicine stand in solidarity with the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and the community of Parkland, Florida. “In medicine, we aim to eliminate the risk factors that are detrimental to the health of our patients. Gun access is one such risk factor that is modifiable and guaranteed to save lives,” said Barbara Elena Sahagún, Class of 2020 (front row, far right). André Belarmino (holding the banner, on the left) Class of 2019, is an alumnus of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School—one of his cousins is a current student who survived the attack.

#MarchForOurLives #WhiteCoatsAgainstGunViolence #WhiteCoats4BlackLives #MDs4MSD #DouglasStrong #MSDStrong #guncontrol #gunlegislation #marjorystonemandouglashighschool #parkland #health #hcsm #meded

Our Location

Newsroom

Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
Instagram
YouTube
Vimeo

Weill Cornell Medicine
Office of External Affairs

1300 York Ave.
Box 314
New York, NY 10065
Phone: (646) 962-9564

News+
Press Room+
Publications+
- Weill Cornell Medicine Magazine
Video & Photography+
- Photography
- Videos
Social Media+
- Social Media Guidelines
About Us+
- Contact Request Form
- Staff Directory

Care. Discover. Teach. With a legacy of putting patients first, Weill Cornell Medicine is committed to providing exemplary and individualized clinical care, making groundbreaking biomedical discoveries, and educating generations of exceptional doctors and scientists.

Weill Cornell Medicine

Privacy & Legal
Careers
Giving
Directory

You are here

Social Media

Twitter

Facebook

Instagram