COVID-Apps: Misdirecting Public Health Attention in a Pandemic.

When there is no vaccine for a disease, 'Test, Trace, Treat/Isolate' is the public health go-to directive. During the COVID-19 pandemic, mobile phone apps are designed to improve on this. But COVID-apps have not been effective as a public health tool.

How Nurses Come to Race: Racialization in Public Health Breastfeeding Promotion.

This research study shows how race becomes ascribed through nursing theory and day-to-day workplace socialization processes. We show how public health nurses supporting and promoting breastfeeding for new mothers learn about and reproduce racialized stereotypes, which shape the care they provide. Even when nurses attempt to actively resist racialized stereotypes, most participate in essentialized nursing practice by using racialized institutional practices.

Cell Phones ≠ Self and Other Problems with Big Data Detection and Containment during Epidemics.

Evidence from Sierra Leone reveals the significant limitations of big data in disease detection and containment efforts. Early in the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, media heralded HealthMap's ability to detect the outbreak from newsfeeds. Later, big data-specifically, call detail record data collected from millions of cell phones-was hyped as useful for stopping the disease by tracking contagious people.

'Worse than HIV': The logics of cancer screening avoidance in Swaziland.

This article shows the consequences of competing global health agendas within differential clinical and social worlds. Specifically, it examines how HIV's prominence in local clinical programming in Swaziland influences cervical cancer screening rates. Drawing on 2014 ethnographic research conducted in a semi-urban town in Swaziland, the interview and participant observation data show the relative scarcity of cervical cancer care and the consequences of HIV/AIDS funding and programming dominance.

Global health indicators and maternal health futures: The case of Intrauterine Growth Restriction.

Public health indicators generally operate in the world as credible, apolitical and authoritative. But indicators are less stable than they appear. Clinical critiques of Intrauterine Growth Restriction (IUGR) criteria have been forthcoming for decades.

Antiretroviral Therapy Helps HIV-Positive Women Navigate Social Expectations for and Clinical Recommendations against Childbearing in Uganda.

Understanding factors that influence pregnancy decision-making and experiences among HIV-positive women is important for developing integrated reproductive health and HIV services. Few studies have examined HIV-positive women's navigation through the social and clinical factors that shape experiences of pregnancy in the context of access to antiretroviral therapy (ART). We conducted 25 semistructured interviews with HIV-positive, pregnant women receiving ART in Mbarara, Uganda in 2011 to explore how access to ART shapes pregnancy experiences.

Global health business: the production and performativity of statistics in Sierra Leone and Germany.

The global push for health statistics and electronic digital health information systems is about more than tracking health incidence and prevalence. It is also experienced on the ground as means to develop and maintain particular norms of health business, knowledge, and decision- and profit-making that are not innocent. Statistics make possible audit and accountability logics that undergird the management of health at a distance and that are increasingly necessary to the business of health.

Fetal views: histories and habits of looking at the fetus in Germany.

This article examines historical and ideological trajectories that have made looking at the fetus via ultrasound a normal part of being pregnant for many women around the world. How did looking into so unlit a bodily space as the uterus become so natural? So everyday? So habit-forming? The answers lie in the convergence over time of technological hardware with knowledge practices that moved from medical to public domains. Germany serves as a site for an interrogation of how learned ways of thinking about anatomy, the development of technologies that "look," a privileging of the visual in medical domains, and seeing as metaphor for truth about health reinforced and normalized prenatal ultrasound use.

Post-diagnostic abortion in Germany: reproduction gone awry, again?

Routine use of prenatal diagnostic technologies (PDTs) such as ultrasound and amniocentesis result in the detection of a small percentage of fetal anomalies. For those women faced with the diagnosis of fetal disability, a decision must be made to continue or terminate the pregnancy. When the diagnosis is merely hypothetical, the discursive specter of post-diagnostic abortion is shaped by social and historical contexts in which interested discourses (regional, political, ethical, and religious) weigh in with varying degrees of authority and influence.