Stuart Blume - Böcker

Vaccination programmes now represent a major part of the effort devoted to improving the health of children in developing countries. These donor-funded programmes tend to be global in scope and focus on worldwide goals and targets such as 'polio eradication', and the Millennium Development Goals. Health policy makers at the national level are expected to implement these programmes in a standard manner and report progress according to a few standard indicators. Pressures and incentives to achieve the targets set are then transmitted down to the community level health worker who actually meets the parents and children to implement the programmes. Drawing on first hand, original research in India and Malawi carried out by the contributors, as well as existing literature, Protecting the World's Children: Immunisation policies and practices suggests that there is little or no scope allowed for the effects of variance in the way health systems work, the difficulties and tensions faced by health workers, or differences in the way people think about childhood illnesses that reflect cultural differences. The book argues that the need to show progress can create distortions and lead to the production of misleading data and an unwillingness to report problems. It proposes that vaccines could more effectively serve children's health needs if immunisation programmes are better understood and acknowledged, and if local knowledge and realities were enabled to inform national and international health policy. Written by an international, interdisciplinary team of experts in immunisation policy, Protecting the World's Children is an integrative study of immunisation policy and practice at a global, national and community level, and is an essential resource for researchers and practitioners in international and public health, as well as professionals in international and development studies.

Globally, there has been a move away from national public sector vaccine development over the past 30 years. Immunization and States: The Politics of Making Vaccines explores vaccine geopolitics, analyzing why, and how this move happened, before looking at the ramifications in the context of Covid-19.This unique book uses eight country studies – looking at Croatia, India, Iran, the Netherlands, Romania, Serbia, Spain, and Sweden – to explore the role of public sector vaccine institutes, past and present. Raising questions about national sovereignty, the erosion of multilateralism, and geopolitics, it also contributes to debates around public interest and privatization in the health sector. An extended introduction sets the chapters in an international context, whilst the epilogue looks forward to the future of vaccine development and production.This is an important book for students, scholars, and practitioners with an interest in vaccine development from a range of fields, including public health, medicine, science and technology studies, history of medicine, politics, international relations, and the sociology of health and illness.

Globally, there has been a move away from national public sector vaccine development over the past 30 years. Immunization and States: The Politics of Making Vaccines explores vaccine geopolitics, analyzing why, and how this move happened, before looking at the ramifications in the context of Covid-19.This unique book uses eight country studies – looking at Croatia, India, Iran, the Netherlands, Romania, Serbia, Spain, and Sweden – to explore the role of public sector vaccine institutes, past and present. Raising questions about national sovereignty, the erosion of multilateralism, and geopolitics, it also contributes to debates around public interest and privatization in the health sector. An extended introduction sets the chapters in an international context, whilst the epilogue looks forward to the future of vaccine development and production.This is an important book for students, scholars, and practitioners with an interest in vaccine development from a range of fields, including public health, medicine, science and technology studies, history of medicine, politics, international relations, and the sociology of health and illness.

The 1980 Black Report by Sir Douglas Black has kept health inequalities at the forefront of the public health agenda. This volume explores the history and development of studies and concern over health inequalities especially in relation to the 1980 report.

The 1980 Black Report by Sir Douglas Black has kept health inequalities at the forefront of the public health agenda. This volume explores the history and development of studies and concern over health inequalities especially in relation to the 1980 report.

When it was first developed, the cochlear implant was hailed as a "miracle cure" for deafness. That relatively few deaf adults seemed to want it was puzzling. The technology was then modified for use with deaf children, 90 percent of whom have hearing parents. Then, controversy struck as the Deaf community overwhelmingly protested the use of the device and procedure. For them, the cochlear implant was not viewed in the context of medical progress and advances in the physiology of hearing, but instead represented the historic oppression of deaf people and of sign languages.Part ethnography and part historical study, The Artificial Ear is based on interviews with researchers who were pivotal in the early development and implementation of the new technology. Through an analysis of the scientific and clinical literature, Stuart Blume reconstructs the history of artificial hearing from its conceptual origins in the 1930s, to the first attempt at cochlear implantation in Paris in the 1950s, and to the widespread clinical application of the "bionic ear" since the 1980s.

Mass vaccination campaigns are political projects that presume to protect individuals, communities, and societies. Like other pervasive expressions of state power - taxing, policing, conscripting - mass vaccination arouses anxiety in some people but sentiments of civic duty and shared solidarity in others. This collection of essays gives a comparative overview of vaccination at different times, in widely different places and under different types of political regime. Core themes in the chapters include immunisation as an element of state formation; citizens' articulation of seeing (or not seeing) their needs incorporated into public health practice; allegations that donors of development aid have too much influence on third-world health policies; and an ideological shift that regards vaccines more as profitable commodities than as essential tools of public health.An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

Why are growing numbers of parents worldwide questioning the wisdom of having their children vaccinated? Why have public-sector vaccine producers been sold off? And can we trust the multinational corporations that increasingly dominate vaccine development and production? In this hard-hitting book Stuart Blume argues that globalization and healthcare deficiencies are eroding faith in the institutions producing and providing vaccines. He tells the history of immunization practices, from the work of early pioneers such as Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch to the establishment of the World Health Organization and the introduction of genetic engineering.Immunization exposes the limits of public health authorities while suggesting how they can restore our confidence. Public health experts and all those considering vaccinations should read this timely history.

This volume of the Sociology of the Sciences Yearbooks stems from our experience that collaborations between non-scientists and scientists, often initiated by scientists seeking greater social relevance for science, can be of major importance for cognitive development. It seemed to us that it would be useful to explore the conditions under which such collaborations affect scientific change and the nature of the processes involved. This book therefore focuses on a number of instances in which scientists and non-scientists were jointly involved in the genera­ tion of scientific results at the "interface" of science and society. Despite the considerable variety of cases reported here, a number of questions are central. Under what conditions do such cooperative processes occur? What perceptions of social relevance and what sorts of col­ laborations with non-scientific groups are involved? How is this collaboration achieved, and through what forums? How can insights into its conditions and mechanisms stabilize such cooperations over a longer period of time? If they are stabilized, do they really affect science, or do they mainly function to shield the rest of the science system against external influences? These questions are pertinent both to intellectual problems in the sociology of science and to the practical concerns of modern science policies. The significance of relations between knowledge producers and knowledge consumers and interest in how these relations affect science and society have changed considerably in recent decades.