How do we remember death when it constitutes our landscape? In an age of ubiquitous mortality—not only pandemic deaths, but also deaths from meteorological disasters, deaths of migrants…
(Editor’s Note: This blog post is part of the Thematic Series Data Swarms Revisited) Treponema pallidum spirochetes under microscope using a modified Steiner silver stain. Obtained from the…
Epidemics and Society (LBST 2101) UNC Charlotte, Fall 2020 Online/Asynchronous This syllabus contains policies and expectations I have established for this course. Please read the enti…
Tests for Covid-19 and the politics of big numbers We are incessantly flooded with data on the evolution of the Covid-19 pandemic. WHO and the Johns Hopkins coronavirus…
What is the object of epidemiological interventions during an epidemic? Is it the virus, the disease, the fear, the chaos, or the threat to security? And what is the objective…
How one medical anthropologist is boosting our capacity to understand and contend with COVID-19. In late February 2020, I traveled back to the United States from India and…
In December 2019, reports emerged of a pneumonia of unknown origin in the city of Wuhan, China. A week into 2020, a novel pathogen was identified–– “severe acute…
The COVID-19 pandemic has been called “a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco” (Ioannides, 2020), while the editor of the Lancet has declared that “the handling of the COVID-19 crisis in the…
Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic Richard A. McKay University of Chicago Press, 2017, 400 pages “An innocent he was not. He eventually told…
Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency Andrew Lakoff University of California Press, 2017. 240 pages. Let us be frank: it is hard to think preparedness…
Fig. 1. All-cause mortality, ages 45–54 for US White non-Hispanics (USW), US Hispanics (USH), and six comparison countries: France (FRA), Germany (GER), the United Kingdom (UK), Canada (CAN),…
The World Health Organization recently released its long-awaited final report on the organization’s response to the 2014 Ebola epidemic. The report opens by explaining that, however tragic the…
In this Book Forum, our commentators respond to Theresa MacPhail’s provocative ethnography of influenza research and public health response, The Viral Network: A Pathography of the H1N1…
Michael Agar Rachelle Annechino invited me to write something about the concept of “public health” as I experienced it in my decades-long and checkered past in the drug…