A physician-anthropologist explores how public health practices—from epidemiological modeling to outbreak containment—help perpetuate global inequities. In Epidemic Illusions, Eugene Richardson, a physician and an anthropologist, contends that public health practices—from epidemiological modeling and outbreak containment to Big Data and causal inference—play an essential role in perp…
How food industry lobbyists and a small group of scientists have successfully fought government efforts to reduce dangerous levels of sodium in our food. A high-sodium diet is deadly; studies have linked it to high blood pressure, strokes, and heart attacks. It's been estimated that excess sodium in the American diet causes as many as 100,000 deaths and many billions of dollars in avoidable …
From science advocate and March on Science National Co-Chair Jonathan M. Berman, an essential takedown of the anti-vaccination movement, from its nineteenth-century antecedents to today's Facebook activists, offering strategies for refuting false claims of friends and family. Vaccines are a documented success story, one of the most successful public health interventions in history. Yet there…
Experts discuss the potential of early intervention to transform outcomes for people with mental disorders. Mental illness represents one of the largest disease burdens worldwide, yet treatments have been largely ineffective in improving the quality of life for millions of affected individuals—in part because approaches taken have focused on late-stage disorders in adulthood. This volume s…
This volume provides a systematic framework for energy suppliers, policy makers, academics, students, and all others interested in energy security, and analyzes key issues concerning energy, security and sustainability with the help of a wealth of data. While sustainability is the broadest objective, energy security is an important part of it, at the global, national and societal levels. The de…
How biases, the desire for a good narrative, reliance on citation metrics, and other problems undermine confidence in modern science. Modern science is built on experimental evidence, yet scientists are often very selective in deciding what evidence to use and tend to disagree about how to interpret it. In The Matter of Facts, Gareth and Rhodri Leng explore how scientists produce and use evi…
The development, manufacturing, and use of contraceptive methods from the late nineteenth century to the present, viewed from the perspective of reproductive justice. The beginning of the modern contraceptive era began in 1882, when Dr. Aletta Jacobs opened the first birth control clinic in Amsterdam. The founding of this facility, and the clinical provision of contraception that it enabled,…
The relationship of the dead body with technology through history, from nineteenth-century embalming machines to the death-prevention technologies of today. Death and the dead body have never been more alive in the public imagination—not least because of current debates over modern medical technology that is deployed, it seems, expressly to keep human bodies from dying, blurring the bounda…
How early twentieth century fumigation technologies transformed maritime quarantine practices and inspired utopian visions of disease-free global trade. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fumigation technologies transformed global practices of maritime quarantine through chemical and engineering innovation. One of these technologies, the widely used Clayton machine, blasted …
While it has been argued that anonymity in gamete donation has been brought to an end by legal changes and technological developments, Amelie Baumann suggests that this is in fact still in transformation. By focusing on the narratives of those who were conceived with anonymously donated gametes in the UK and Germany, she examines this transformative process and the role which donor-conceived pe…