New Books In Public Health

Is there an institution in the United States that enjoys a better reputation than the American Red Cross? In her thorough, accessible new book The American Red Cross from Clara Barton to the New Deal (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012), Marian Moser Jones(associate professor of family science, University of Maryland School of Public Health) traces the history of the American Red Cross as a humanitarian relief organization. The book shows how the ARC developed from a local, national organization into one with worldwide scope. As it did, it had to cope with trials that challenged its original structure and mission. Progressives and professionals contested Clara Barton’s informal style of leadership and management. Crises oversees and domestically put tension on the ARC’s commitment to maintaining neutrality in order to preserve access to the suffering. And the increasing scope of federal and state authority forced it to rethink it’s role in an increasingly crowded humanitarian marketplace. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve all heard the saying that when arguing we should ‘disagree without being disagreeable’ but, when it comes to guns, we often find ourselves disagreeing without actually disagreeing. Most Americans believe in some kinds of gun control. Most Americans recognize the ‘right to bear arms’. Most agree that expanded background checks can be useful in keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous or irresponsible people. Considering that there is so much agreement on basic policy, what the gun debate desperately needs is sober clear-headed analysis. “Reducing Gun Violence in America” edited by Daniel Webster contributes greatly to this need.Daniel W. Webster and Jon S. Vernick‘s Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) brings together experts on public health and public policy and makes the case for a variety of reforms ranging from expanded background checks to greater support of federal agencies like the ATF. It dissects gun violence in its many manifestations (homicides, accidental deaths, suicides) and explores the relationship between these tragedies and public health more broadly. It also examines technology to reduce gun violence like ‘personalized handguns’ as well as international gun control initiatives in countries like Brazil, the UK, and Australia.Daniel Webster was kind enough to speak with us. I hope you enjoy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marta Hanson‘s book is a rich study of conceptions of space in medical thought and practice. Ranging from a deep history of the geographic imagination in China to an account of the SARS outbreak of the 21st century, Hanson’s book maps the transformations of medicine and healing in late imperial... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When I arrived at college in the early 1980s, drugs were cool, music was cool, and drug-music was especially cool. The coolest of the cool drug-music bands was The Velvet Underground. They were from the mean streets of New York City (The Doors were from the soft parade of L.A….); they hung out with Andy Warhol (The Beatles hung out with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi…); they had a female drummer (The Grateful Dead had two drummers, but that still didn’t help…); and, of course, they did heroin. Or at least they wrote a famous song about it. We did not do heroin, but we thought that those who did–like Lou Reed and the rest–were hipper than hip. I imagine we would have done it if there had been any around (thank God for small favors).We thought we had discovered something new. But as Eric C. Schneider points out in his marvelous Smack: Heroin and the American City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), the conjunction of music, heroin, and cool was hardly an invention of my generation. The three came together in the 1940s, when smack-using bebop players (think Charlie Parker) taught the “Beat Generation” that heroin was hip. Neither was my generation the last to succumb to a heroin fad. The triad of music, heroin, and cool united again in the 1990s, when drug-addled pop-culture icons such as Jim Carroll (The Basketball Diaries), Kurt Cobain (Nirvana), and Calvin Klein (of “heroin chic” fame) taught “Generation X” the same lesson. History, or at least the history of heroin, repeats itself.For white, middle-class folks like me heroin chic was an episode, a rebellious moment in an otherwise “normal” American life. But as Schneider makes clear, the passage of heroin from cultural elites to the population at large was not always so benign, particularly in the declining inner-cities of the 1960s and 1970s. Here heroin had nothing to do with being cool and everything to do with earning a living and escaping reality. For millions of impoverished, hopeless, urban-dwelling hispanics and blacks, heroin was a paycheck and a checkout. The drug helped destroy the people in the inner-city, and thus the inner-city itself.In response to the “heroin epidemic” of the 1960s and 1970s, the government launched the first war on drugs, focusing its energy on “pushers.” But there were no “pushers” because–and this is the greatest insight in a book full of great insights–pushing was not the way heroin use spread, either among middle-class college kids or the down-and-out of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. No one pushed heroin on anyone. Rather, users taught their friends how to use; in turn, those friends–now users–taught their friends, and so on. Heroin stealthily spread through personal networks. The only part of the process that was visible was the result: in the case of suburban college kids, bad grades and rehab; in the case of poor urban hispanics and blacks, crime and incarceration.Not surprisingly, when the heroin “epidemic” ended, it was not due to the war on drugs. Heroin simply fell out of fashion, in this case being replaced by another fashionable drug, powder and crack cocaine. Today we are fighting cocaine just as we fought heroin, and, by all appearances, with similar success. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When in medical school, I found myself drawn to the study of infectious diseases in large part because of the mixture of science and anthropology – infectious diseases are always about the way we interact with the world around us, what we do with whom and when and where and how often. Take the recent examples of the global spread of pandemic influenza (a respiratory virus spread in the air) and the epidemic of cholera in Haiti (which depends on lack of access to clean water to spread), and how in each case the spread of the infection says something about the world and the ways in which the world’s population is connected. Now, the most important infection of our time is HIV, and its predominant modes of transmission are particularly complicated and culturally loaded human behaviors: sex and intravenous drug use.In her engaging, informative, and fun book, The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS (Norton, 2008), Elizabeth Pisani draws on her experiences doing field work as an epidemiologist in Indonesia and on staff at UN AIDS, the joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, during the time when the world was coming to grips with the fact of an exploding global epidemic of HIV. If you want to design effective interventions, you have to understand exactly who and what those interventions should target. But how easy is it to figure out who has sex with whom and when and where and how often? Or who injects drugs and shares needles? Doing so is loaded with pitfalls, and Elizabeth lays them out for us, exploring how preconceptions, ignorance, and technical problems can cloud our ability to see what’s really happening, to interpret what we see, and, most importantly, to figure out effective ways to intervene. She reminds us that what’s true for Jersey may be completely false in Jakarta. And, on top of all that, how do you convince the people who hold the purse-strings to pay for everything? These are fascinating problems and we thank Elizabeth for sharing her expert insights.Elizabeth’s blog and website, The Wisdom of Whores, is also a great source of news and ideas in the world of HIV/AIDS and much else. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If a parent decides not to vaccinate their children, is that an individual choice, or is it a serious threat to the public health? In Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All (Basic Books, 2011), Dr. Paul Offit discusses the very real threats to the public health created by the anti-vaccine movement, both in the U.S. and around the world. In the book, Dr. Offit reviews the history of vaccines, their importance, and the various attempts to discredit them over the past few centuries. One of these efforts, readers will be interested to know, led to the creation of the Raggedy Ann doll. Read all about it, and more, in Dr. Offit’s frightening new book.Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices