Kristin Harper reviews A Fraught Embrace: The Romance & Reality of AIDS Altruism in Africa. Ann Swidler and Susan Cotts Watkins provide a scathing, often funny, and always compassionate look at donor-sponsored AIDS prevention programs in Malawi.
Recently, UC Berkeley Professor Jason Corburn was awarded an 18-month grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for his project “Learning from Slum Upgrading for Building Healthy Communities.” Here, we interview him about his planned work. What is the goal of this project? The idea is to initiate a set of conversations between activists, researchers, and decision-makers involved in building more healthy and equitable communities. We hope to share strategies and learn from one another across the Global South and North, with the ultimate goal to reduce social and health inequities in urban communities around the world. Participants in the project include community activists, researchers, NGOs, community-based organizations, and community residents. The goal is to have practitioners from countries in the Global South, mostly in Africa and Southeast Asia, engage in a deep conversation with healthy community activists and practitioners in low-income communities of color in the U.S, namely in East Oakland and Richmond, California. This is just a starting point. The idea is not to rush to find one best practice, but to develop a new global network of practice – of action – that supports health equity. How do you plan to implement these ideas? The first task […]
This week, IAPHS member Kristin Harper interviews medical anthropologist Emily Mendenhall (Georgetown University) about a recent series of articles on the concept of syndemics that she spearheaded in The Lancet. In these articles, Mendenhall and co-authors explore what syndemics are and how the concept can aid population health research and help us work toward a healthier future. Here, Mendenhall answers questions about how this series came to be, and the effect she hopes it has on the field. What is a syndemic? When you consider the concept of a syndemic, you can think about it at two levels, the individual level or the population level. First, if you’re a clinician, you think about it at the individual level. The concept of the syndemic is similar to the concepts of co-morbidity or multi-morbidity, but it takes seriously social conditions. One of the easiest examples is HIV and tuberculosis. What drives the link between these two infections? Poverty, low social status, living conditions, and the immunosuppression of HIV increase a person’s risk for activated TB and worsen their overall health. When you walk into a clinic, you have to understand that people are having these syndemic experiences, where social and health problems are […]
An interview with primatologist Jenny Tung This week, IAPHS member Kristin Harper interviewed primatologist Jenny Tung of Duke University about her recent article “Social status alters immune regulation and response to infection in macaques,” which appeared in Science this November. Tung’s study explores how stress resulting from the manipulation of social status affects immune function in rhesus macaques, a common species of Old World monkey. Tung found that social status influenced everything from immune cell numbers to the expression of immune genes to signaling pathways, with implications for the monkeys’ ability to fight infections. Interestingly, social subordination appears to promote antibacterial responses, whereas high social status promotes antiviral responses. Since social status is one of the strongest predictors of human disease risk and mortality, studies such as Tung’s may help us better understand the impact these factors have on the immune response in humans. Here, Tung answers questions about the work she did with collaborators Mark Wilson (Emory University/Yerkes Primate National Research Center) and Luis Barreiro (University of Montreal) to carry out this study. How did you get interested in the biological effects of social status? I’ve been interested in social behavior and evolution for quite some time, since before […]
Congress debates what to do about the Affordable Care Act Although one of the Republican Party’s main goals for years has been to repeal the Affordable Care Act, just how to do it — and what to replace it with — has sparked much debate recently. GOP leaders provide new details about ObamaCare repeal (The Hill, 2/16/2017) Will Obamacare really go under the knife? (New York Times Magazine, 2/14/2017) GOP health bill draft would cut Medicaid, emphasize tax credits (NPR, 2/24/2017) Update on the CDC’s Winnable Battles initiative In a recent article in JAMA, Thomas Frieden and coauthors reported on the progress made in the 6 focus areas that the CDC identified as winnable battles in 2010. Read about what worked well and what didn’t work so well! What do we mean when we talk about health equity? IAPHS board member David Kindig recently published a Viewpoint in JAMA entitled Population Health Equity: Rate and Burden, Race and Class. In it, he argues that equity must address both the rates of poor health in different groups and the absolute numbers of affected individuals, and that working-class whites may often bear an equal or greater equity burden than racial minorities. Some […]