Borderline well-being: Mental health in a development zone.

Mental illness contributes hugely to global disease burden. Inadequate resources, limited access to services and pervasive stigma jointly foster its increasing severity, especially in resource-poor countries. Despite recognition that social determinants such as poverty, inequality and marginalization aggravate mental distress, minimal scrutiny has focused on the negative impact of targeted development schemes creating social and economic change that exacerbates mental health risks for poor people.

The technological imperative in tuberculosis care and prevention in Vietnam.

A monocausal bacteriological understanding of infectious disease orients tuberculosis control efforts towards antimicrobial interventions. A bias towards technological solutions can leave multistranded public health and social interventions largely neglected. In the context of globalising biomedical approaches to infectious disease control, this ethnography-inspired review article reflects upon the implementation of rapid diagnostic technology in low- and middle-income countries.

Vigilance and Sentinels in Global Health Security.

Global health security is increasingly reliant on vigilance to provide early warning of transnational health threats. In theory, this approach requires that sentinels, based in communities most affected by new or reemerging infectious diseases, deliver timely alerts of incipient risk. Medicalizing global safety also implies there are particular forms of insecurity that must be remedied to preempt disease spread.

Deviance and resistance: Malaria elimination in the greater Mekong subregion.

Malaria elimination rather than control is increasingly globally endorsed, requiring new approaches wherein success is not measured by timely treatment of presenting cases but eradicating all presence of infection. This shift has gained urgency as resistance to artemisinin-combination therapies spreads in the Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS) posing a threat to global health security. In the GMS, endemic malaria persists in forested border areas and elimination will require calibrated approaches to remove remaining pockets of residual infection.

Linked spaces of vulnerability: HIV risk amongst migrant Dai women and their left-behind husbands in Southwest China.

In one county of Southwest China bordering Myanmar, large numbers of minority Dai women leave to work in southern Thailand. Many are married and they leave behind husbands and children, sending remittances and returning home intermittently. These women commonly establish relations with Chinese/Malaysian men in their worksites--massage parlours in the tourist sites near the Malaysian border.

Trade circles: aspirations and ethnicity in commercial sex in Laos.

The contours of commercial sex in Lao PDR are significantly shaped by forces facilitating the entry of women from one ethnic group, the Khmu, into this service industry niche. Agricultural transitions, development policies, changing gender roles, ethnic hierarchies, snowballing recruitment networks and growing capitalist sensibilities collectively prompt poor Khmu women to aspire to material gain via selling beer and sex. Their predominance in lower echelons of the sex industry demonstrates how forces of neoliberal expansion build on both opportunity and enduring marginalisation and that material economies are closely intertwined with intimate economies as trajectories of modernisation evolve in contemporary Laos.

Fleeing the fire: transformation and gendered belonging in Thai HIV/AIDS support groups.

By the turn of the millennium, HIV had infected nearly one million people in Thailand. A large number of support groups now exist throughout the country. These groups have emerged as the primary forum through which having HIV is negotiated and normalized in Thai society.

Harm reduction and alternative development in the Golden Triangle.

The authors of this Digest are anthropologists from Macquarie University, Sydney Australia. At the invitation of the German aid agency GTZ, they have been monitoring opium use and the impact of drug rehabilitation in Muang Sing Laos over the past 3 years. Their role is to provide analyses of how development projects alter the social make-up of their target communities and contribute to ways in which substance use/abuse is understood, practiced and controlled or reconfigured.

Sister cities and easy passage: HIV, mobility and economies of desire in a Thai/Lao border zone.

It is recognised that people movement can increase potential risk of HIV transmission. In recent years, mobile populations moving across national borders have become a focus for HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns. These programs generally target border "hot zones" that produce high levels of HIV vulnerability due to the degree of mobility and the risk behaviours fostered by these marginal environments.