Health service needs and perspectives of a rainforest conserving community in Papua New Guinea's Ramu lowlands: a combined clinical and rapid anthropological assessment with parallel treatment of urgent cases.

Objectives: Determine community needs and perspectives as part of planning health service incorporation into Wanang Conservation Area, in support of locally driven sustainable development.

Design: Clinical and rapid anthropological assessment (individual primary care assessments, key informant (KI) interviews, focus groups (FGs), ethnography) with treatment of urgent cases.

Setting: Wanang (pop.

Severely stigmatised skin neglected tropical diseases: a protocol for social science engagement.

More than one billion people are affected by neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) and many of these diseases are preventable. While the grouping of these conditions as NTDs has generated vast mapping, mass drug administration and surveillance programmes, there is growing evidence of gaps and weaknesses in purely biomedical approaches, and the need for responses that also recognise the social determinants of health. In order to unpack the social and political determinants of NTDs, it is important to view the problem from a social science perspective.

Health service needs and perspectives of remote forest communities in Papua New Guinea: study protocol for combined clinical and rapid anthropological assessments with parallel treatment of urgent cases.

Introduction: Our project follows community requests for health service incorporation into conservation collaborations in the rainforests of Papua New Guinea (PNG). This protocol is for health needs assessments, our first step in coplanning medical provision in communities with no existing health data.

Methods And Analysis: The study includes clinical assessments and rapid anthropological assessment procedures (RAP) exploring the health needs and perspectives of partner communities in two areas, conducted over 6 weeks fieldwork.

Comparison of social resistance to Ebola response in Sierra Leone and Guinea suggests explanations lie in political configurations not culture.

Sierra Leone and Guinea share broadly similar cultural worlds, straddling the societies of the Upper Guinea Coast with Islamic West Africa. There was, however, a notable difference in their reactions to the Ebola epidemic. As the epidemic spread in Guinea, acts of violent or everyday resistance to outbreak control measures repeatedly followed, undermining public health attempts to contain the crisis.

New therapeutic landscapes in Africa: parental categories and practices in seeking infant health in the Republic of Guinea.

In considering African health care practice, it is usual to draw strong distinctions between biomedical and traditional practices, and between public and private health institutions. Whilst distinctions between traditional and biomedical, and between public and private medicine make sense from the vantage point of health professionals, we question how far these distinctions are pertinent in shaping health-seeking behaviour given experience of them. This paper argues that other distinctions are becoming far more important to African therapeutic landscapes to the ways that people evaluate the salience of different health providers to their problems.

Where techno-science meets poverty: medical research and the economy of blood in The Gambia, West Africa.

This paper considers how internationally supported medical research is understood and interpreted by its actual and potential study subjects, exposing the limits to bioethical discourses amidst economic inequalities and contrasting socio-cultural worlds. It focuses on the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratories in The Gambia and particularly their Pneumococcal Vaccine Trial (PVT) that was conducted jointly with the Gambian government during 2001-2004. In many respects this was an exemplar of international best practice in trial communication and informed consent procedures.

Public engagement with science? Local understandings of a vaccine trial in the Gambia.

This paper considers how parents engage with a large, internationally supported childhood pneumococcal vaccine trial in The Gambia. Current analysis and professional reflection on public engagement is strongly shaped by the imperatives of public health and research institutions, and is thus couched in terms of acceptance and refusal, and 'informed consent'. In contrast Gambian parents' perspectives on the trial are couched in conceptual and experiential terms that are linked to their wider dilemmas of raising infants amidst the hazards of globally connected village life.

'MMR talk' and vaccination choices: an ethnographic study in Brighton.

In the context of the high-profile controversy that has unfolded in the UK around the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and its possible adverse effects, this paper explores how parents in Brighton, southern England, are thinking about MMR for their own children. Research focusing on parents' engagement with MMR has been dominated by analysis of the proximate influences on their choices, and in particular scientific and media information, which have led health policy to focus on information and education campaigns. This paper reports ethnographic work including narratives by mothers in Brighton.