When People Come First

Critical Studies in Global Health

João Biehl, Adriana Petryna, João Biehl, Adriana Petryna

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780691157399, 9780691157382
• eBook ISBN: 9781400846801
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Public Health, Administration & Care
• Index: Social Sciences

A people-centered approach to global health

When People Come First critically assesses the expanding field of global health. It brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars to address the medical, social, political, and economic dimensions of the global health enterprise through vivid case studies and bold conceptual work. The book demonstrates the crucial role of ethnography as an empirical lantern in global health, arguing for a more comprehensive, people-centered approach.

Topics include the limits of technological quick fixes in disease control, the moral economy of global health science, the unexpected effects of massive treatment rollouts in resource-poor contexts, and how right-to-health activism coalesces with the increased influence of the pharmaceutical industry on health care. The contributors explore the altered landscapes left behind after programs scale up, break down, or move on. We learn that disease is really never just one thing, technology delivery does not equate with care, and biology and technology interact in ways we cannot always predict. The most effective solutions may well be found in people themselves, who consistently exceed the projections of experts and the medical-scientific, political, and humanitarian frameworks in which they are cast.

When People Come First sets a new research agenda in global health and social theory and challenges us to rethink the relationships between care, rights, health, and economic futures.

Index

ABATE chemical, 226–27, 228–29

ABC approach (Uganda), 104, 105

accountability: advocacy and, 97, 181–83, 339; EBM seen as solution to demands for public health, 84; evidence-based medicine (EBM) audit culture of, 67, 76–79; government service, 182, 330; illness and individual, 325; increasing demands for NGO, 77; infused into heart of the research methodology, 78–79; major aid flows to Africa and, 170; medicinal access and, 330

Adams, Vincanne, 25–26, 54, 134, 351, 355, 365, 366

Africa: Booster Program for Malaria Control in Africa work in, 48; brief history of Ghana guinea worm in West, 210–15; Ghana Guinea Worm Eradication Program success in, 138–39, 207–36; human rights controversy over HIV testing in, 99; marginalization of pain in clinical medicine in, 188–91; Mozambique’s ART programs, 168–81; Namibian High Court forced sterilization order (2012), 106; Nigerian guinea worm eradication, 214–15, 217, 221; People’s Republic of Congo, 36; personalistic patron-client systems in, 151. See also malaria eradication programs; South Africa; Uganda

African-Americans: chronic racial disparities and public health genetics, 318–22; metabolic syndrome and, 321; women targeted as at-risk population, 320–22

African palliative care movement, 188

Afro-Caribbean population, 318

AIDS “exceptionalism,” 94, 98

AIDS journal, 83

AIDS Law Project (now Section 27), 103

AIDS orphanhood: comparing 1993 and 2002 surveys on South African, 125–26; controversies over AIDS in South Africa and role of, 126–28; increasing rates of, 112, 113; “moral economies” concept to address, 27–29; “problematization” of, 111, 127–29; projections of, 125; “Survival Guide for AIDS Orphans” (Mail & Guardian) on, 125. See also HIV/AIDS epidemic

AIDS-related Kaposi’s sarcoma See. Botswana cancer epidemic

AIDS Support Organization (TASO) [Uganda], 141, 142, 153–54, 156, 161–62

áimo (vital energy), 287, 292, 299

Alvarado, Rubén, 280, 283

American biomedicine: chronic disease focus of, 303; as critical to Barbados government health interventions, 304; public health shift toward genetic predisposition, 316–18; statistics mapping used in, 305. See also United States

American Diabetes Association, 320

American Heart Association, 320

Amon, Joseph J., 26–27, 91, 363

Annan, Kofi, 42

Anopheles mosquitoes, 350

antidepressants: as “adaptation” medicine, 292; used to restore áimo (vital energy), 287, 292, 299; Violeta’s story on using, 276–78. See also depression

antimalarial drugs: ACT (artemisinin combination therapies), 41–42, 45, 47; artemisinin, 36, 41; chloroquine, 36, 41; limited research (early 1980s) on, 36. See also malaria epidemic

anti-TB drug market: MRs’ (medical respresentatives’) perceptions of private prescribers in the, 264–69; MRs’ views of their role in the, 259–64; MRs’ views on DOTS in context of, 269–72; rise of Lupin Ltd. in the, 245, 257–59; RMPs (r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Critical Global Health
• I Evidence
• II Interventions
• III Markets
• Afterword: The Peopling of Technologies
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• References
• Index