Ben Oppenheim

• PhD
• Fellow at New York University

We developed a dataset consisting of outbreak data collected from official, open-source surveillance reports representing more than 170 pathogens, 237 countries and territories, and more than 3300 events that occurred primarily between 1963 and 2023. Here we present and analyze a subset of these data, comprising a dataset of human epidemic events w...

Underreporting of infectious diseases is a pervasive challenge in public health that has emerged as a central issue in characterizing the dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic. Infectious diseases are underreported for a range of reasons, including mild or asymptomatic infections, weak public health infrastructure, and government censorship. In this st...

Introduction Infectious disease misinformation is widespread and poses challenges to disease control. There is limited evidence on how to effectively counter health misinformation in a community setting, particularly in low-income regions, and unsettled scientific debate about whether misinformation should be directly discussed and debunked, or imp...

The proliferation of composite data sources tracking the COVID-19 pandemic emphasises the need for such databases during large-scale infectious disease events as well as the potential pitfalls due to the challenges of combining disparate data sources. Multiple organisations have attempted to standardise the compilation of disparate data from multip...

Background : Health systems strengthening (HSS) and health security are two pillars of universal health coverage (UHC). Investments in these areas are essential for meeting the Sustainable Development Goals and are of heightened relevance given the emergence of the 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19). This study aims to generate information o...

Research from developed countries indicates that improving how government communicates with the public can increase trust in government and satisfaction with public services. In countries affected by violent conflict, communication has even been described as the ‘missing link’ necessary to rebuild a positive relationship between citizen and state....

Zika virus infection during pregnancy can cause microcephaly and other birth defects. We hypothesized that the Latin America Zika epidemic resulted in pregnant women and their partners adopting behavioral changes to limit risk, leading them to forego travel to Zika-affected locations. We evaluated this hypothesis by studying travelers’ intent and b...

Data used in Fig 1. Variables include Year_Month, Babymoon (mean Google Trend Index score for “babymoon”), Zika_baby (mean Google Trend Index score for “zika baby”), Zika (mean Google Trend Index score for “Zika”), and Microcephaly (mean Google Trend Index score for “microcephaly”). (CSV)

Introduction Robust metrics for national-level preparedness are critical for assessing global resilience to epidemic and pandemic outbreaks. However, existing preparedness assessments focus primarily on public health systems or specific legislative frameworks, and do not measure other essential capacities that enable and support public health prepa...

After armed conflict, there is often a surge in programmes designed to consolidate the peace. During the transition to peace, the quality of programme management has been argued to shape public perceptions about government and citizenship. What aspects of programme management are most important? What implementation failures have the greatest negati...

The World Bank is publishing nine volumes of Disease Control Priorities, 3rd edition (DCP3) between 2015 and 2018. Volume 9, Improving Health and Reducing Poverty, summarises the main messages from all the volumes and contains cross-cutting analyses. This Review draws on all nine volumes to convey conclusions. The analysis in DCP3 is built around 2...

Rumors run rife in areas affected by political instability and conflict. Their adoption plays a key role in igniting many forms of violence, including riots, ethnic conflict, genocide, and war. While unverified at the time of transmission, some rumors are widely treated as truth, while others are dismissed as implausible or false. What factors lead...

Military theorists and practitioners have long argued that training shapes how combatants treat civilians during war. Yet there is little systematic evidence regarding the impact of training on wartime behavior, and almost none for non-state armed groups, despite the fact that such groups intensively train their fighters in order to shape their beh...

Anti-insurgent militias and states attempt to erode insurgent groups’ capacities and co-opt insurgent fighters by promising and providing benefits. They do so to create a perception that the insurgency is unraveling and to harness inside information to prosecute more effective counterinsurgency campaigns. Why do some insurgents defect to a paramili...

Illegal organizations, like mafia syndicates, gangs and insurgencies, are often highly cohesive and hostile towards the outside world. Such groups cultivate a particular form of “anti-social” capital, which relies on in-group bonding and limits out-group bridging for the purpose of commissioning illicit acts. We argue that experiences within the gr...

Subnational conflict and development in Asia

Accessible under: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2246455 War-torn societies are often racked with generalized distrust, both among citizens and between citizens and the state. Even long after conflict ends, former combatants who participated in violence and challenged the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force may have an especially unsettled r...

A guerrilla war is an intimate affair, fought not merely with weapons but fought in the minds of the men who live in the villages and in the hills, fought by the spirit and policy of those who run the local government. Over the past decade, community development, a program design that inverts standard foreign aid models by putting the poor in charg...

What is the relationship between the type of training combatants receive upon recruitment into an armed group and their propensity to abuse civilians in civil war? Does military training or political training prevent or exacerbate the victimization of civilians by armed non-state actors? While the literature on civilian victimization has expanded r...