Post-war smoking policy in the UK and the redefinition of public health

Current analyses of UK smoking policy within two frameworks--the 'heroes and villains' view of journalist accounts and a political science emphasis on rival 'producer' and 'issue' networks in policy making. It is often assumed that the US experience provides a universal historical model. This paper sees smoking policy in the UK as a case study in the relationship between 'scientific fact creation' and policy, which has also been emblematic of wider changes in public health ideology. The issue of smoking and lung cancer symbolized the post-war shift from infectious to chronic disease and the rise of a new 'lifestyle'-oriented public health. In the 1980s passive smoking brought a revival of environmentalism; in the 1990s the rediscovered concept of addiction symbolized developments in public health in which curative and preventive initiatives were entwined. Despite the rise of a militant 'healthism' within both anti-smoking and public health since the 1970s, British policy retained a dual focus, an emphasis on risk reduction as well as risk elimination in which policy networks were entwined rather than distinct. Some public health scientists worked in policy milieux, notably the expert committee, which crossed this apparent divide and which linked with industry. Connections between government and industry changed as public health 'treatment' brought the pharmaceutical industry into the picture.     

Human security and public health in Southeast Asia: the SARS outbreak

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is now a global public health threat with many medical, ethical, social, economic, political, and legal implications. (Abdullah et al. 2003 Abdullah ASM 2003 ‘Lessons from the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak in Hong Kong’ Emerging Infectious Diseases Journal [online] September. Available from: URL: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol9no9/03–0366.htm [Crossref] [Google Scholar])

No man is an island. (John Donne)

The security of the state is dependent on the security of its individual citizens. If they are not secure, the state is not secure. Traditional, state‐dominant, conceptions of security are ill‐equipped to provide understanding into the array of security concerns that now confront nation‐states. In November 2002, one of these new security concerns, a corona pulmonary virus jumped the species barrier to begin infecting people in southern China. Three months later this virus was unwittingly transmitted from mainland China to Hong Kong. From there it spread rapidly throughout most of Southeast Asia as well as through parts of the Americas and Europe. Now known as the SARS—Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome—virus, it became a major threat to the stability and prosperity of Southeast Asian countries. This article reviews the spread and impact of the SARS virus within Southeast Asia from a human security perspective. It is intended that the utilisation of human security in this instance will not only provide a better understanding of the impact of SARS on regional states but will also advance the conceptualisation of the human security model.     

Stigmatized ethnicity, public health, and globalization

The prejudicial linking of infection with ethnic minority status has a long-established history, but in some ways this association may have intensified under the contemporary circumstances of the "new public health" and globalization. This study analyzes this conflation of ethnicity and disease victimization by considering the stigmatization process that occurred during the 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in Toronto. The attribution of stigma during the SARS outbreak occurred in multiple and overlapping ways informed by: (i) the depiction of images of individuals donning respiratory masks; (ii) employment status in the health sector; and (iii) Asian-Canadian and Chinese-Canadian ethnicity. In turn, stigmatization during the SARS crisis facilitated a moral panic of sorts in which racism at a cultural level was expressed and rationalized on the basis of a rhetoric of the new public health and anti-globalization sentiments. With the former, an emphasis on individualized self-protection, in the health sense, justified the generalized avoidance of those stigmatized. In relation to the latter, in the post-9/11 era, avoidance of the stigmatized other was legitimized on the basis of perceiving the SARS threat as a consequence of the mixing of different people predicated by economic and cultural globalization.     

Governing population, public health, and malaria in the early Turkish republic

In the early Turkish republic of the 1920s, population was a central question of concern for the leadership of the Kemalist state. This article focuses on how a demographic discourse concerning population – in terms both numerical and medical – provided a basis for emerging programs in public health, confronting the very real threats posed by disease. Employing the example of the nascent republic’s anti-malarial campaigns, this study thus examines the discursive, cartographic, and legislative measures employed in combating this widespread disease in the wider contexts of nation-building. In doing so, it traces one vital trajectory of the development of modern governmentality (i.e., that of public health) in the case of Turkey during the 1920s and 1930s, prior to the wartime slowing of state investments (due to national defense priorities), the post-World War II infusions of foreign aid and the incorporation of DDT in confronting malaria.     

Ethnography and policy: Perspectives on reproduction in anthropology and public health

MacCormack, Carol, ed. Ethnography of Fertility and Birth. New York: Academic Press, 1982. x + 293 pp. including illustrations, notes, references, index. $35.00 cloth.

Mangay‐Maglacas, A., and H. Pizurki, eds. The Traditional Birth Attendant in Seven Countries: Case Studies in Utilization and Training. Geneva: World Health Organization Public Health Papers 75, 1981. 211 pp. including appendices, references. Sw. fr. 15.00.     

Bioterrorism: US public health and a secular apocalypse

This analysis was prepared for the 'Bioterrorism: Historical contexts, long-term consequences' conference held at the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, on 8 May 2002. A revised version was presented at the panel 'A plagued future? Emerging diseases, bioweapons, and other anticipated microbial horrors' at the 2002 American Anthropological Association Meetings, 23 November. I thank meeting participants for their comments, as well as Nick King, Joe Masco and the anonymous referees for AT. I am indebted to colleagues D.A. Henderson, Tara O'Toole, Tom Inglesby and Michael Mair for their reflections on the humanitarian and public policy dilemmas posed by bioweapons, and to Onora Lien and Ari Schuler for research assistance.     

Healthy vocations: field nursing and the religious overtones of public health

This article argues that the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) field nursing program of the 1930s, which continued much of the same assimilation-style health care practices begun generations earlier by missionaries and field matrons, perpetuated the nineteenth-century link between religion and health care. Following in the footsteps of their female predecessors, field nurses targeted native women for health education, emphasizing personal hygiene and individual responsibility at the expense of socioeconomic causes of illness. Native women nonetheless appear to have maintained agency and power in negotiating health and health care. Peaking during the era of OIA Commissioner John Collier's Indian New Deal, the history of field nursing problematizes this period, particularly with regard to women's experiences. The article is significant for its exploration of field nursing as a contested site of cultural negotiation, revealing issues of power and difference in the lives of American women.     

Cities without cavities: democracy, risk, and public health

This essay examines the history of fluoride debates in four Canadian cities. It argues that fluoride's opponents were primarily motivated by what they saw as the health and environmental risks of adding fluoride to the water supply. They also believed that fluoridating the public water supply was a fundamental violation of civil liberties. The fluoride debates have much to teach us about how people evaluate potential health risks and how they respond to state interventions in the field of public health.