Why diagnostic tests are at the heart of the global coronavirus response and why they fail to provide certainty
On 12 February 2020, the number of new cases of coronavirus in Hubei Province, China, rose by 14,840. This sudden rise in numbers was not due to a surge of new infections. Instead, it was caused by changes to the way …
Getting to Zero: A Doctor and a Diplomat on the Ebola Frontline
By Sinead Walsh and Oliver Johnson
Zed Books, 2018. 352 pages.
It is midnight and my five-month-old son, who has been sick with diarrhea for two days, is finally breathing evenly beside me. I should be sleeping. Instead, I am fretting, turning over the intimate logics of medical responses to …
This article is part of the following series: Diagnostic stories
In June 2015, as Sierra Leone and Guinea was experiencing new surges in clusters of Ebola virus cases, Nature published a news article asking why an inexpensive test that “could save lives” was not being deployed to the field. Indeed, while it seemed obvious to many policy makers and health experts that Ebola rapid diagnostic tests were urgently needed, the …
This article is part of the following series: Diagnostic stories
The origins of laboratory medicine are often traced to the establishment of a small clinical laboratory in Guy’s Hospital, London, in 1828. Here, in a small side-room, medical students used sterilisers, incubators and microscopes to identify bacteriological organisms in biological samples taken from the patients in the ward next door. In this simple removal of bodily fluid from the patient’s …
On 11th May 2016 the Students of Medical Anthropology (SoMA) at University of Edinburgh, the student group within Edinburgh’s Centre for Medical Anthropology (EdCMA) held their inaugural event, a symposium entitled ‘Who Cares?’
As early career scholars in medical anthropology working across a variety of health-related contexts, we (SoMA) realised that care as a theme was present in all …
The fantastic papers in this symposium cover a wide diversity of topics, from the fallout of dementia on kinship relationships, to exchanges with Gods, to the self-administering of make-up, to medical research. So how do we know we are all talking about the same thing? One of the strengths of anthropology is the way we stretch concepts, test them in …