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Configuring Contagion: Ethnographies of Biosocial Epidemics (Epistemologies of Healing #19)
By Lotte Meinert, Jens Seeberg. 2022
Expanding our understanding of contagion beyond the typical notions of infection and pandemics, this book widens the field to include…
the concept of biosocial epidemics. The chapters propose varied and detailed answers to questions about epidemics and their contagious potential for specific infections and non-infectious conditions. Together they explore how inseparable social and biological processes configure co-existing influences, which create epidemics, and in doing so stress the role of social inequality in these processes. The authors compellingly show that epidemics do not spread evenly in populations or through simple coincidental biological contagion: they are biosocially structured and selective, and happen under specific economic, political and environmental conditions. This volume illustrates that an understanding of biosocial factors is vital for ensuring effective strategies for the containment of epidemics.Practitioner Research for Social Work, Nursing, and the Health Professions
By Michael T. Wright, Payam Sheikhattari, Gillian B. Silver, Cyrilla van der Donk, Bas Van Lanen. 2022
An invaluable tool for health and social work students and professionals who want to improve their practice through collaborative research…
with patients, clients, and colleagues.Throughout history, some of the most prominent contributors to health and social sciences have been men and women comfortable with both practice and academia. But today, research in health-related fields is increasingly conducted in specialized settings by people who are first and foremost researchers. Critics bemoan this loss of practice-based research, long considered a vital part of the contribution that doctors, nurses, public health workers, and social workers can make both to their field and the communities in which they work. Unfortunately, the explosion of new discoveries in health-related fields, along with the exponential increase in the amount of knowledge being produced and the growing demands of practice, have caused both the production and application of knowledge to become highly specialized and increasingly complex. This has resulted in a widening gap between research and practice.Recognizing the need for a guide to this type of research, Practitioner Research for Social Work, Nursing, and the Health Professions is a thoroughly reimagined version of a book originally published in 2011 in the Netherlands. Aimed at American practitioners, it is a highly practical guide for anyone in social work, nursing, and other health care and social welfare settings. Its seven-step Practitioner Research Method offers readers a tried-and-true approach to conducting research in their own work environments, and the authors use real-world examples to highlight strategies for overcoming barriers and incorporating research.While leading practitioners through each stage of the research process, the authors explain in detail how to apply a variety of field-tested tools and techniques. A unique and indispensable resource for students in undergraduate and graduate research courses, as well as for seasoned professionals who seek a practical guide for developing and implementing their own research projects in social work, nursing, and the health professions, this book is also the first textbook to introduce the concept and practice of practitioner research to an American audience.HIV Pioneers: Lives Lost, Careers Changed, and Survival
By Wendee M. Wechsberg. 2018
A moving collection of firsthand accounts of the HIV epidemic.Tremendous strides have been made in the prevention and treatment of…
HIV since the disease first appeared in the 1980s. But because many of the people who studied and battled the virus in those early days are now gone, firsthand accounts are at risk of being lost. In HIV Pioneers, Wendee M. Wechsberg collects 29 "first stories" from the outset of the AIDS epidemic. These moving personal narratives and critical historical essays not only shed light on the experiences of global health pioneers, prominent scientists, and HIV survivors, but also preserve valuable lessons for managing the risk and impact of future epidemics.With unprecedented access to many key actors in the fight against AIDS and HIV, Wechsberg brings to life the harrowing reality of those early days of the epidemic. The book captures the experiences of those still working diligently and innovatively in the field, elevating the voices of doctors, scientists, and government bureaucrats alongside those of survivors and their loved ones. Focusing on the impact that the epidemic had on careers, pieces also show how governments responded to HIV, how research agendas were developed, and how AIDS service agencies and case management evolved.Illuminating the multiple facets of the HIV epidemic, both in the United States and across the globe, HIV Pioneers is a touching and inspirational look into the ongoing fight against HIV.Contributors: Quarraisha Abdool Karim, Salim S. Abdool Karim, Lynda Arnold, Anne Jeanene Bengoa, Robert E. Booth, Barry S. Brown, Thomas Coates, Francine Cournos, James W. Curran, Don C. Des Jarlais, Jeffrey D. Fisher, William A. Fisher, Samuel R. Friedman, Robert C. Gallo, Mary Guinan, Gibbie Harris, Warren W. Hewitt Jr., Susan M. Kegeles, Rayford Kytle, Bishop Stacey S. Latimer, Robert Love, Duane C. McBride, Clyde B. McCoy, Carmen Morris, Willo Pequegnat, Mary Jane Rotheram-Borus, Jeffrey Samet, David Serwadda, Lorraine Sherr, James L. Sorensen, Jack B. Stein, Charles van der Horst, Wendee M. Wechsberg, Wayne Wiebel, William A. ZuleAbortion across Borders: Transnational Travel and Access to Abortion Services
By Christabelle Sethna & Gayle Davis. 2019
A timely examination of how restrictive policies force women to travel both within and across national borders to access abortion…
services.Safe, legal, and affordable abortion is widely recognized as an essential medical service for women across the world. When access to that service is denied or restricted, women are compelled to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, seek backstreet abortionists, attempt self-induced abortions, or even travel to less restrictive states, provinces, and countries to receive care.Abortion across Borders focuses on travel across domestic and international boundaries to terminate a pregnancy. Christabelle Sethna and Gayle Davis have gathered a cadre of authors to examine how restrictive policies force women to move both within and across national borders in order to reach abortion providers, often at great expense, over long distances and with significant safety risks. Taking historical and contemporary perspectives, contributors examine the situation in regions that include Texas, Prince Edward Island, Ireland, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Eastern Europe. Throughout, they take a feminist intersectional approach to transnational travel and access to abortion services that is sensitive to inequalities of gender, race, and class in reproductive health care.This multidisciplinary volume raises challenging logistical, legal, and ethical questions while exploring the gendered aspects of medical tourism. A noticeable rollback of reproductive rights and renewed attention to border security in many parts of the world will make Abortion across Borders of timely interest to scholars of gender and women's studies, health, medicine, law, mobility studies, and reproductive justice. Contributors: Barbara Baird, Niklas Barke, Anna Bogic, Hayley Brown, Lori A. Brown, Cathrine Chambers, Ewelina Ciaputa, Gayle Davis, Mary Gilmartin, Agata Ignaciuk, Sinéad Kennedy, Lena Lennerhed, Jo-Ann MacDonald, Colleen MacQuarrie, Jane O'Neill, Clare Parker, Christabelle Sethna, Sally SheldonInstrumental Intimacy: EEG Wearables and Neuroscientific Control
By Melissa M. Littlefield. 2018
A critical examination of the rise of wearable EEG monitors.From Fitbits to GPS trackers, wearables promise to help us understand…
and improve ourselves in quantified ways. We count our steps, track our location, and even monitor our brain waves as we strive to achieve better fitness, clearer direction, or a more focused mind. But why do we rely on wearables to learn about ourselves? In Instrumental Intimacy, Melissa M. Littlefield questions our desire for mechanistic guidance by examining brain-based EEG wearables that promise to improve sleep, relationships, self-knowledge, and learning. Littlefield focuses specifically on EEGs’ transition out of the laboratory and into the hands of consumers. While other brain-imaging technologies (such as MRI, PET, and MEG) are used only in specialized laboratories, human electroencephalography (a.k.a. EEG) is embedded in portable, user-friendly devices. These direct-to-consumer wearables visualize brain activity as accessible data, and many offer the promise of self-optimization.Littlefield’s illuminating book brings the histories of EEG to bear on the contemporary development of EEG wearables via case studies of EEG-based sleep aids, bio-mapping instruments, fashionable surveillance tools, and athletic training devices. The author argues that, over the past century, applied uses of EEG helped to create new states of mind to be monitored and manipulated, as well as discourses about the existence of brain waves and their viability as a tool for brain optimization. By contextualizing and analyzing EEG wearables, Instrumental Intimacy provides a crucial intervention in an emergent consumer market and in the scholarly fields of STS, critical neuroscience, and the history of technology.The Backwash of War: An Extraordinary American Nurse in World War I
By Ellen N. La Motte. 2019
Banned in multiple countries for its frank depiction of the horrors of war, Ellen N. La Motte's The Backwash of…
War is one of the most stunning antiwar books ever published."We are witnessing a phase in the evolution of humanity, a phase called War—and the slow, onward progress stirs up the slime in the shallows, and this is the Backwash of War. It is very ugly."—Ellen N. La MotteIn September 1916, as World War I advanced into a third deadly year, an American woman named Ellen N. La Motte published a collection of stories about her experience as a war nurse. Deemed damaging to morale, The Backwash of War was immediately banned in both England and France and later censored in wartime America. At once deeply unsettling and darkly humorous, this compelling book presents a unique view of the destruction wrought by war to the human body and spirit. Long neglected, it is an astounding book by an extraordinary woman and merits a place among major works of WWI literature. This volume gathers, for the first time, La Motte's published writing about the First World War. In addition to Backwash, it includes three long-forgotten essays. Annotated for a modern audience, the book features both a comprehensive introduction to La Motte's war-time writing in its historical and literary contexts and the first extended biography of the "lost" author of this "lost classic." Not only did La Motte boldly breach decorum in writing The Backwash of War, but she also forcefully challenged societal norms in other equally remarkable ways, as a debutante turned Johns Hopkins–trained nurse, pathbreaking public health advocate and administrator, suffragette, journalist, writer, lesbian, and self-proclaimed anarchist.Containing Contagion: The Politics of Disease Outbreaks in Southeast Asia
By Sara E. Davies. 2019
Do states have a duty to prevent infectious disease outbreaks from spreading beyond their borders?The fields of global health and…
international relations are increasingly concerned with the responsibilities of nations to respond to disease outbreaks in a way that safeguards their neighbors as well as the broader international community. In Containing Contagion, Sara E. Davies focuses on one of the world's most pivotal (and riskiest) regions in the field of global health—Southeast Asia, which in recent years has responded to a wave of emerging and endemic infectious disease outbreaks ranging from Nipah, SARS, and avian flu to dengue and Japanese encephalitis.Between 2005 and 2010, Davies explains, Southeast Asian states, despite having vastly different health system capacities and political systems, repeatedly committed to pursue a collective approach to the communication of outbreaks. Davies draws on newly gathered data and extensive field interviews to explore how these states implemented the revised International Health Regulations (IHR) through the deliberate alignment of political interests and regional cooperation. Examining why these Southeast Asian states adopted a collective approach, Davies also describes the complications that ensued and traces the consequences of this approach.The first book to explore what problems exist in the relationship between international relations and health, Containing Contagion frames contrasting views of global health agency within the current crises that are facing global health. Providing an immediate, contemporary example of a region networking its response to disease outbreak events, this insightful book will appeal to global health governance scholars, students, and practitioners.Advanced Microfluidics Based Point-of-Care Diagnostics: A Bridge Between Microfluidics and Biomedical Applications
By Raju Khan, Chetna Dhand, S. K. Sanghi, Shabi Thankaraj Salammal, and A. B. P. Mishra. 2022
This book provides a well-focused and comprehensive overview of novel technologies involved in advanced microfluidics based diagnosis via various types…
of prognostic and diagnostic biomarkers. This authors examine microfluidics based diagnosis in the biomedical field as an upcoming field with extensive applications. It provides a unique approach and comprehensive technology overview for diagnosis management towards early stages of various bioanalytes via cancer diagnostics diabetes, alzheimer disease, toxicity in food products, brain and retinal diseases, cardiovascular diseases, and bacterial infections etc. Thus, this book would encompass a combinatorial approach of medical science, engineering and biomedical technology. The authors provide a well-focused and comprehensive overview of novel technologies involved in advanced microfluidics based diagnosis via various types of prognostic and diagnostic biomarkers. Moreover, this book contains detailed description on the diagnosis of novel techniques. This book would serve as a guide for students, scientists, researchers, and microfluidics based point of care technologies via smart diagnostics and to plan future research in this valuable field.Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell
By Paul A. Lombardo. 2022
This updated edition includes a new afterword that identifies the role the Buck story plays in the Supreme Court's review…
of emerging state laws that seek to limit access to abortion."Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Few lines from U.S. Supreme Court opinions are as memorable as this declaration by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in the landmark 1927 case Buck v. Bell. The ruling allowed states to forcibly sterilize residents in order to prevent "feebleminded and socially inadequate" people from having children. It is the only time the Supreme Court endorsed surgery as a tool of government policy. Though Buck set the stage for more than sixty thousand involuntary sterilizations in the United States and was cited at the Nuremberg trials in defense of Nazi sterilization experiments, it has never been overturned. It has been more than a decade since Paul A. Lombardo's classic Three Generations, No Imbeciles first exposed the Buck case's fraudulent roots. During that time, several of the remaining twentieth-century eugenic sterilization statutes have finally been repealed, and reparations to sterilization survivors have been paid in two states. Discussion of the Buck case has once again engendered controversy in the courts. The Wisconsin Supreme Court invoked Buck most recently in a debate over the power of the state to enact restrictions on citizens and businesses during the COVID-19 crisis, and the US Supreme Court cited Three Generations, No Imbeciles in arguments over the newest state laws seeking to limit access to abortion. This updated edition collects and analyzes information related to events and trends discussed in the earlier volume and includes a completely new afterword, "Looking Back at Buck," that explains how the case remains a key feature of public discourse about disability, government power, and reproductive rights. It also presents restored copies of the letters of Carrie Buck and points readers to an online archive of legal documents, images, and other material relevant to the case. The book remains a key resource for law school faculties, legal and medical historians, and anyone with an interest in the history of reproduction in the United States."Startling."—Reason"Compelling and well-researched... Three Generations, No Imbeciles gives Carrie Buck's long-untold story the attention it deserves."—Harvard Law Review"Three Generations provides valuable, new, and timely revelations for students and professional scholars across many disciplines."—Disability Studies Quarterly"Meticulously detailed and researched history... this book is enjoyable, thought provoking, and troubling in equal measure. I highly recommend it."—Psychiatric ServicesWhy is there such a deep partisan division within the United States regarding how health care should be organized and…
financed—and how can we encourage politicians to band together again for the good of everyone?For decades, Democratic and Republican political leaders have disagreed about the fundamental goals of American health policy. The modern-day consequences of this disagreement—particularly in the Republicans' campaign to erode the coverage and equity gains of the Affordable Care Act—can be seen in the tragic and disparate impact of COVID-19 on the country. In Crossing the American Health Care Chasm, Donald A. Barr, MD, PhD, details the breakdown in political relations in the United States. Why, he asks, has health policy—which used to be a place where the two sides could find common ground—become the nexus of fiery political conflict?From Harry S. Truman's failed attempt to enact a plan for national health insurance to the recent efforts of President Donald J. Trump, Barr's historical analysis also touches on every presidential administration in between. Tracing the bipartisanship that developed over the four decades following the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, Barr explains why this spirit of cooperation has given way to such a seemingly unbridgeable ideological chasm. Exploring how political conflict affects health care organization, financing, and delivery, Barr also offers a detailed analysis of the multiple attempts on the part of congressional Republicans and the Trump administration either to weaken or to repeal the ACA. Crossing the American Health Care Chasm offers a series of steps that policy makers can take to improve the national health care situation and provide a basis for ongoing bipartisanship as we continue to confront the policy challenges facing our country.Ultimately, Barr argues, this divide is more dangerous than ever at a time when health care costs continue to skyrocket, the number of uninsured Americans is rising, many state governments are chipping away at Medicaid, and the GOP has not let up in its efforts to dismantle the ACA. This book will be of profound interest both to those responsible for carrying out national health care policy and to those who study health policy from an academic perspective.Imperfect Pregnancies: A History of Birth Defects and Prenatal Diagnosis
By Ilana Löwy. 2017
How has prenatal testing, once offered only for high-risk pregnancies, become standard medical care for pregnant women today?In the 1960s,…
thanks to the development of prenatal diagnosis, medicine found a new object of study: the living fetus. At first, prenatal testing was proposed only to women at a high risk of giving birth to an impaired child. But in the following decades, such testing has become routine. In Imperfect Pregnancies, Ilana Löwy argues that the generalization of prenatal diagnosis has radically changed the experience of pregnancy for tens of millions of women worldwide. Although most women are reassured that their future child is developing well, others face a stressful period of waiting for results, uncertain prognosis, and difficult decisions. Löwy follows the rise of biomedical technologies that made prenatal diagnosis possible and investigates the institutional, sociocultural, economic, legal, and political consequences of their widespread diffusion. Because prenatal diagnosis is linked to the contentious issue of selective termination of pregnancy for a fetal anomaly, debates on this topic have largely centered on the rejection of human imperfection and the notion that we are now perched on a slippery slope that will lead to new eugenics. Imperfect Pregnancies tells a more complicated story, emphasizing that there is no single standardized way to scrutinize the fetus, but there are a great number of historically conditioned and situated approaches. This book will interest students, scholars, health professionals, administrators, and activists interested in issues surrounding new medical technologies, screening, risk management, pregnancy, disability, and the history and social politics of women’s bodies.Finding the Right Words: A Story of Literature, Grief, and the Brain
By Cindy Weinstein. 2021
The moving story of an English professor studying neurology in order to understand and come to terms with her father's…
death from Alzheimer's.In 1985, when Cindy Weinstein was a graduate student at UC Berkeley, her beloved father, Jerry, was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease. He was fifty-eight years old. Twelve years later, at age seventy, he died having lost all of his memories—along with his ability to read, write, and speak. Finding the Right Words follows Weinstein's decades-long journey to come to terms with her father's dementia as both a daughter and an English professor. Although her lifelong love of language and literature gave her a way to talk about her grief, she realized that she also needed to learn more about the science of dementia to make sense of her father's death. To write her story, she collaborated with Dr. Bruce L. Miller, neurologist and director of the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco, combining personal memoir, literature, and the science and history of brain health into a unique, educational, and meditative work. Finding the Right Words is an invaluable guide for families dealing with a life-changing diagnosis. In chapters of profound and sometimes humorous remembrance, Weinstein relies on literature to describe the shock of her father's diagnosis and his loss of language and identity. Writing in response to Weinstein's deeply personal narrative, Dr. Miller describes the neurological processes responsible for the symptoms displayed by her father. He also reflects upon his own personal and professional experiences. In a final chapter about memory, Weinstein is able to remember her father before the diagnosis, and Miller explains how the brain creates memories while sharing some of his own. Their two perspectives give readers a fuller understanding of Alzheimer's than any one voice could.From Enforcers to Guardians: A Public Health Primer on Ending Police Violence
By Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Hannah L. Cooper. 2020
A public health approach to understanding and eliminating excessive police violence.Excessive police violence and its disproportionate targeting of minority communities…
has existed in the United States since police forces first formed in the colonial period. A personal tragedy for its victims, for the people who love them, and for their broader communities, excessive police violence is also a profound violation of human and civil rights.Most public discourse about excessive police violence focuses, understandably, on the horrors of civilian deaths. In From Enforcers to Guardians, Hannah L. F. Cooper and Mindy Thompson Fullilove approach the issue from a radically different angle: as a public health problem. By using a public health framing, this book challenges readers to recognize that the suffering created by excessive police violence extends far outside of death to include sexual, psychological, neglectful, and nonfatal physical violence as well.Arguing that excessive police violence has been deliberately used to marginalize working-class and minority communities, Cooper and Fullilove describe what we know about the history, distribution, and health impacts of police violence, from slave patrols in colonial times to war on drugs policing in the present-day United States. Finally, the book surveys efforts, including Barack Obama's 2015 creation of the Task Force on 21st Century Policing, to eliminate police violence, and proposes a multisystem, multilevel strategy to end marginality and police violence and to achieve guardian policing. Aimed at anyone seeking to understand the causes and distributions of excessive police violence—and to develop interventions to end it—From Enforcers to Guardians frames excessive police violence so that it can be understood, researched, and taught about through a public health lens.Disorders of Sex Development: A Guide for Parents and Physicians (A Johns Hopkins Press Health Book)
By Amy B. Wisniewski, Steven D. Chernausek, Bradley P. Kropp. 2012
Compassionately written by an experienced team of professionals, this book offers parents and families essential information about the causes, diagnosis,…
and treatment of disorders of sex development, or DSD.DSD refers to medical conditions, usually discovered at birth, in which there is disagreement between a person's genetic sex (i.e., chromosomes) and the appearance of the person's external or internal reproductive structures. After their child is diagnosed with DSD, parents need answers to a host of questions, including• What is DSD, why does it occur, how is it identified, and how is it treated?• Did we do something to cause our child's DSD?• Is my baby a boy or a girl?• Will my child grow up to be normal and healthy?• Does my child need surgery?This concise book answers parents' questions in a reassuring and forthright way, giving affected individuals, their families, and their health care providers a current and evidence-based picture of DSD. It offers clear explanations of how newborns with DSD are evaluated, diagnosed, and treated; describes the different kinds of DSD; and pays close attention to both psychosocial and medical aspects of DSD. This guide also includes information about the importance of support groups and education for affected individuals and their families.In their daily work, the authors treat, support, and educate people with DSD and their families. This resource gives parents and families access to the authors' expertise so they can reach a meaningful understanding of their child's DSD and make informed decisions about their child's health.Borderline Personality Disorder: New Reasons for Hope (A Johns Hopkins Press Health Book)
By Patrick Kelly, Francis Mark Mondimore. 2012
Borderline personality disorder is a severe and complex psychiatric condition that, until recently, many considered nearly untreatable. But this optimistic…
guide to BPD provides information that will bring newfound hope to those who have this painful disorder, and to their family and friends. People with borderline personality disorder have problems coping with almost everything, and therefore anything can provoke them to impulsive actions, angry outbursts, and self-destructive behaviors. Their personal relationships are simultaneously overly dependent and strained, if not openly hostile, and frequently explosive. Incorporating the latest research and thinking on the disorder, Johns Hopkins psychiatrists Francis Mark Mondimore and Patrick Kelly conceptualize it in an original way. They explain that symptoms are the result of biological and behavioral problems, extremes of temperament, and impaired psychological coping, all of which may have a relationship with traumatic life events. The authors advocate a therapeutic approach incorporating compassion and optimism in the face of what is often a tumultuous disease. With proper treatment, people with borderline personality disorder can enjoy long remissions and improved quality of life.The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank: Inside Psychoanalysis
By E. James Lieberman, Gregory C. Richter. 2012
Sigmund Freud’s relationship with Otto Rank was the most constant, close, and significant of his professional life. Freud considered Rank…
to be the most brilliant of his disciples. The two collaborated on psychoanalytic writing, practice, and politics; Rank was the managing director of Freud’s publishing house; and after several years helping Freud update his masterpiece, The Interpretation of Dreams, Rank contributed two chapters. His was the only other name ever to be listed on the title page. This complete collection of the known correspondence between the two brings to life their twenty-year collaboration and their painful break.The 250 letters compiled by E. James Lieberman and Robert Kramer humanize and dramatize psychoanalytic thinking, practice, and organization from 1906 through 1925. The letters concern not just the work and trenchant contemporaneous observations of Freud and Rank but also their friendships, supporters, rivals, families, travels, and other personal and professional matters. Most interestingly, the letters trace Rank’s growing independence, the father-son schism over Rank’s "anti-Oedipal" heresy, his surprising reconciliation with Freud, and the moment when they parted ways permanently. A candid picture of how the pioneers of modern psychotherapy behaved with their patients, colleagues, and families—and each other—the correspondence between Freud and Rank demonstrates how psychoanalysis developed in relation to early twentieth-century science, art, philosophy, and politics.A rich primary source on psychiatry, history, and culture, The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank is a cogent and powerful narrative of early psychoanalysis and its two most important personalities.Genetic Medicine: A Logic of Disease
By Barton Childs. 1999
In Genetic Medicine: A Logic of Disease, Barton Childs demonstrates that knowledge of the ways both genes and environment contribute…
to disease provides a rational basis for medical thinking. This "genetic" medicine, he explains, should help the physician use the results of laboratory tests to perceive the uniqueness of the patient as well as that of the family and the cultural conditions in which the patient's condition arose. Childs thus provides a conceptual framework within which to teach and practice a humane medicine.The Task Force for Child Survival: Secrets of Successful Coalitions
By William W. Foege. 2018
How did coalition-building give rise to the incredible achievements of the Task Force for Childhood Survival?Dr. Bill Foege, one of…
the best-known names in global health, brings readers to the table during the creation of one of the world’s most famous and successful global health efforts—the Task Force for Child Survival.In 1984, the US immunization program was so successful that many childhood diseases were at record lows—yet 40,000 children a day were dying around the world from preventable diseases. That year, Dr. Foege, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, came together with Jonas Salk, Robert McNamara, and representatives from UNICEF, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme, and the Rockefeller Foundation to see how some of the lessons learned in America could be applied to global programs. The assembled participants recommended the formation of a small task force to help UN agencies improve immunization coverage. They dubbed it the Task Force for Child Survival and installed Foege as its first leader.In this book, Dr. Foege describes the task force from its conception through its landmark success. Over its first six years, as more resources were allocated to the task force, immunization coverage climbed from approximately 15 percent of the world’s children for some vaccines to 80 percent of the world’s children for at least one vaccine. UNICEF head Jim Grant called it the greatest peacetime endeavor the world had ever seen. How did this small, independent, low-profile group leverage change in the largest of global health agencies? Foege dissects each element for clues as to why the task force was able to accomplish so much so quickly, ultimately concluding that coalition-building played a major role and explaining how to strengthen coalitions by scrupulously avoiding the turf guarding and credit seeking that are so common to international endeavors.Inspiring and accessible, this brief book combines the distilled advice of one of global health's major leaders with the history of an iconic public health program.Probability without Equations: Concepts for Clinicians
By Bart K. Holland. 1998
An award-winning teacher gives a non-technical explanation of the probability and statistics needed by physicians to interpret laboratory results.Although few…
physicians, nurses, dentists, and other health professionals perform laboratory tests themselves, they all need to be able to interpret the results as well as understand findings reported in the medical literature. A general understanding of probability and statistics is essential for those needing to make daily decisions about the significance of research data, drug interaction precautions, or a patient's positive laboratory test for a rare disease.Written with these needs in mind, Probability without Equations offers a thorough explanation of the subject without overwhelming the reader with equations and footnotes. Award-winning teacher Bart Holland presents a nontechnical treatment of intuitive concepts and presents numerous examples from medical research and practice. In plain language, this book explains the topics that clinicians need to understand:• Analysis of variance• "P-values" and the "t-test"• Hazard models• Regression and correlations• Alpha and beta errors"The Nobel prize-winning physicist Ernest Rutherford was fond of saying that if you need statistics to analyze the results of an experiment, you don't have a very good experiment. In a way he was right. However, a recurrent problem in medicine is that in a certain sense you commonly don't have a good experiment—but not because medical research scientists are generally incompetent! The nature of the data they work with is simply not as predictable as the data in some other fields, so the predictive nature of findings in medical science is generally rather imperfect."—from the introductionPrescribed: Writing, Filling, Using, and Abusing the Prescription in Modern America
By Jeremy A. Greene and Elizabeth Siegel Watkins. 2012
America has had a long love affair with the prescription. It is much more than the written "script" or a…
manufactured medicine, professionally dispensed and taken, and worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year. As an object, it is uniquely illustrative of the complex relations among the producers, providers, and consumers of medicine in modern America. The tale of the prescription is one of constant struggles over and changes in medical and therapeutic authority. Stakeholders across the biomedical enterprise have alternately upheld and resisted, supported and critiqued, and subverted and transformed the power of the prescription. Who prescribes? What do they prescribe? How do they decide what to prescribe? These questions set a society-wide agenda that changes with the times and profoundly shifts the medical landscape. Examining drugs individually, as classes, and as part of the social geography of health care, contributors to this volume explore the history of prescribing, including over-the-counter contraceptives, the patient’s experience of filling opioid prescriptions, restraints on physician autonomy in prescribing antibiotics, the patient package insert, and other regulatory issues in medicine during postwar America.The first authoritative look at the history of the prescription itself, Prescribed is a groundbreaking book that subtly explores the politics of therapeutic authority and the relations between knowledge and practice in modern medicine.