Across the United States, legislators continue to devise new ways to target parents who use drugs through a variety of state systems. In the past twenty years, the number of states penalizing substance use during pregnancy has doubled. Ostensibly a response to rising rates of opioid-related overdose deaths, such state laws almost universally endanger those already at greatest risk. …
Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting: Stigma and the Undoing of Global Health
Alexandra Brewis and Amber Wutich
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. 288 pages.
Background
Dr. Alexandra Brewis & Dr. Amber Wutich—anthropologists at Arizona State Universities School of Evolution and Social Change and The Center for Global Health—make a provocative argument: people at the receiving end of health interventions are stigmatized …
This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
In Turkey, HIV has never been considered a “Turkish” issue, but an issue of Eastern European sex workers and Western queers, both perceived as sexual deviants. However, according to recent data, the number of HIV diagnoses in Turkey has increased by 620% since 2007.[1] Nowhere else has the the incidence of new HIV cases grown so rapidly. Because HIV transmission …
The death of Wuhan doctor Li Wenliang on 7 February 2020 was a turning point in public reactions to the government’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak. The doctor had warned about the new virus, but was silenced and punished, because of the strict prohibition to spread any news about the virus. He got infected himself and this made him a …
This article is part of the following series: A 'Critically Applied' Approach to PrEP
The UNAIDS mission of “Getting to Zero” is supported by three key goals: “Zero infections. Zero deaths. Zero stigma.” By taking up this mission, the San Francisco Department of Public Health (DPH) increased its dedication to ending the epidemic. DPH aims to realize these goals by expanding access to PrEP, ensuring RAPID (Rapid ART Program for HIV Diagnoses) linkage to …
The current issue of Social Science and Medicine is a special issue, entitled “Structural Stigma and Population Health.” A wide-ranging issue, spanning disciplines, methodological approaches, bodily conditions, and countries, it is well worth checking out. As editors Mark Hatzenbuehler and Bruce Link write in their introduction, the issue grows out of work done by the Structural Stigma and Population …