Outcomes of HIV treatment from the private sector in low-income and middle-income countries: a systematic review protocol.

Introduction: Private sector provision of HIV treatment is increasing in low-income and middle-income countries (LMIC). However, there is limited documentation of its outcomes. This protocol reports a proposed systematic review that will synthesise clinical outcomes of private sector HIV treatment in LMIC.

Data, disease and diplomacy: GISAID's innovative contribution to global health.

The international sharing of virus data is critical for protecting populations against lethal infectious disease outbreaks. Scientists must rapidly share information to assess the nature of the threat and develop new medical countermeasures. Governments need the data to trace the extent of the outbreak, initiate public health responses, and coordinate access to medicines and vaccines.

Strategies for achieving global collective action on antimicrobial resistance.

Global governance and market failures mean that it is not possible to ensure access to antimicrobial medicines of sustainable effectiveness. Many people work to overcome these failures, but their institutions and initiatives are insufficiently coordinated, led and financed. Options for promoting global collective action on antimicrobial access and effectiveness include building institutions, crafting incentives and mobilizing interests.

The pharmaceuticalisation of security: Molecular biomedicine, antiviral stockpiles, and global health security.

Pharmaceuticals are now critical to the security of populations. Antivirals, antibiotics, next-generation vaccines, and antitoxins are just some of the new 'medical countermeasures' that governments are stockpiling in order to defend their populations against the threat of pandemics and bioterrorism. How has security policy come to be so deeply imbricated with pharmaceutical logics and solutions? This article captures, maps, and analyses the 'pharmaceuticalisation' of security.

Securing circulation pharmaceutically: Antiviral stockpiling and pandemic preparedness in the European Union.

Governments in Europe and around the world amassed vast pharmaceutical stockpiles in anticipation of a potentially catastrophic influenza pandemic. Yet the comparatively 'mild' course of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic provoked considerable public controversy around those stockpiles, leading to questions about their cost-benefit profile and the commercial interests allegedly shaping their creation, as well as around their scientific evidence base. So, how did governments come to view pharmaceutical stockpiling as such an indispensable element of pandemic preparedness planning? What are the underlying security rationalities that rapidly rendered antivirals such a desirable option for government planners? Drawing upon an in-depth reading of Foucault's notion of a 'crisis of circulation', this article argues that the rise of pharmaceutical stockpiling across Europe is integral to a governmental rationality of political rule that continuously seeks to anticipate myriad circulatory threats to the welfare of populations - including to their overall levels of health.

Medical countermeasures for national security: a new government role in the pharmaceuticalization of society.

How do governments contribute to the pharmaceuticalization of society? Whilst the pivotal role of industry is extensively documented, this article shows that governments too are accelerating, intensifying and opening up new trajectories of pharmaceuticalization in society. Governments are becoming more deeply invested in pharmaceuticals because their national security strategies now aspire to defend populations against health-based threats like bioterrorism and pandemics. To counter those threats, governments are acquiring and stockpiling a panoply of 'medical countermeasures' such as antivirals, next-generation vaccines, antibiotics and anti-toxins.

Haggling over viruses: the downside risks of securitizing infectious disease.

This article analyses how the 'securitization' of highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1) contributed to the rise of a protracted international virus-sharing dispute between developing and developed countries. As fear about the threat of a possible human H5N1 pandemic spread across the world, many governments scrambled to stockpile anti-viral medications and vaccines, albeit in a context where there was insufficient global supply to meet such a rapid surge in demand. Realizing that they were the likely 'losers' in this international race, some developing countries began to openly question the benefits of maintaining existing forms of international health cooperation, especially the common practice of sharing national virus samples with the rest of the international community.