Humans need water, food, rest, care, creativity, community, cooperation, and breathable air. Do we truly need AI? Before we construct irreversible infrastructure, we should examine why we want it, what problems we believe it solves, and what collateral consequences it will produce.

People often claim that AI is essential for solving the world’s biggest problems. That is simply untrue. We already have clear, evidence-based solutions: invest in food security, public health, biodiversity, education; tax wealth fairly; protect planetary systems. The issue is not a lack of knowledge but a failure to act—often because powerful actors deploy marketing, distraction, and disinformation to maintain the status quo. If we aren’t putting into action the solutions forwarded by human experts, what makes us think we’ll listen to AI? More likely, AI will become another instrument used to obscure responsibility, manufacture doubt, and generate a new layer of smoke and mirrors.

A system capable of statistically generating answers to any question comes with costs far beyond the glass of water needed to cool a server rack. It requires rare-earth mining, vast energy consumption, data-centre build-out, massive public subsidies, and ultimately, cognitive offloading at a societal scale. The environments we build end up building us (niche construction): the tools we normalise reshape our cognition, skills, institutions, and even our evolutionary pathways. Once embedded, AI infrastructure will restructure the niches in which our minds develop. Right now AI remains optional, but path dependence teaches us that once a technology becomes woven into critical systems, opting out becomes impossible—no matter how costly it proves to be.

We’ve lived through this before. Firearms, printing presses, fossil fuels, plastics, industrial agriculture—transformative technologies whose adoption was seductive, whose costs were steep, and whose reversibility diminished rapidly once societies reorganised themselves around them. Japan (with firearms) briefly showed that stepping back from a technology is possible, but globally, arms races and economic incentives locked the rest of the world into irreversible adoption. The same structural trap looms with AI.

Meanwhile, policies like Australia’s under-16 social media ban may simply provide political cover for Big Tech to push AI surveillance systems into schools and homes—solutions that would be unnecessary if we addressed the structural conditions that erode family life and reduce parental capacity in the first place. Rather than asking “Which AI tools should monitor our children?” we should be asking “Why have we built a society where such monitoring feels necessary?”

We still have time to ask these questions. Slowing down when the scale of potential harm is unknown, unbounded, or irreversible is wise. We may not achieve a global pause, but we can advocate for deliberate pacing, constrained deployment, democratic oversight, and value-aligned design. The point is not to reject AI outright, but to ensure that its adoption is guided by collective reflection rather than corporate momentum. If we momentarily cordoned off the institutional pressures shaping our choices, what would we collectively endorse building after reflecting upon our deepest values?

Single-use disposable medical plastic waste is a huge issue. But rational, scientific solutions will only take us so far. To truly understand why we use so much plastic in hospitals, we might need something more unexpected: the anthropology of reciprocity. Why do we trust a sealed packet more than a sterilised tool? Why does plastic feel safer than people? How does plastic transform interpersonal dynamics?

Plastic is everywhere in the hospital. It wraps our instruments, lines our clothes, and even surrounds our food. But is it just for convenience? In this two-part short essay, I explore the historical and symbolic dimensions of single-use medical plastics. The first part traces how plastic became indispensable to medicine’s infrastructure; the second asks what this disposability means for care, trust, and the workers behind the seal.

The Plastic Promise: How Disposability Became Normal

From pipette tips and Petri dishes to single-portioned cheese, butter, and crackers, plastic envelops nearly everything in the hospital. Medicine as we know it has come to be defined by the sealed sterility of polyethylene. The crackle and sheen of this pliable and resistant material is a reassuring barrier between cleanliness and contamination. Wrapping our tools of care and encasing our snacks of convenience, plastic is ubiquitous in clinics and wards. But it is not just another material. It is a scaffolding of trust, a substance through which hygiene is performed and safety is signalled. Plastic is part of the architecture of confidence in medical care.

Cementing this everyday commodity in place is a complex network of industrial and financial machinery. Petrochemical giants, automated manufacturing, global supply chains, trade agreements, tax incentives, weak regulatory environments, and subsidised R&D all converge to make plastic cheap, abundant, and logistically indispensable. These infrastructures enable the economies of scale that line our current health system with fossil-fuel-derived polymers, offload the need for in-house sterilisation equipment and protocols, and entrench our dependence on disposability. With every sterile packet torn open, disposability becomes not just habitual, but seemingly inevitable. Far from incidental, these systems normalise a material logic in which convenience eclipses consequence.

In some settings, plastic was originally marketed as a way to preserve nature — a synthetic solution to deforestation and resource depletion. Plastics were framed as modern solutions to the fragility of glass, the labour intensity of rubber, and the ethical cost of ivory. In hospitals, plastic was promoted as clean, modern, efficient, and cost-saving. Plastic could be pre-sterilised and disposed of without the labour of cleaning. It was a technological fix for overburdened systems.

Consider the plastic blood bag. Introduced in the 1950s to replace fragile, reusable glass bottles, it was heralded as a safer, lighter, and more hygienic solution. It reduced the risk of breakage, improved transport logistics, and enabled closed-loop systems that prevented contamination. Likewise, syringes that were once made of glass and metal — cleaned and sterilised between uses — were replaced with single-use plastic versions. These shifts were framed as progressive: practical innovations to meet the demands of modern medicine without drawing on scarce natural materials.

During World War II, the demand for sterile, durable, mass-produced supplies accelerated the use of plastic in medicine. From there, plastic embedded itself not only in surgical theatres and laboratories but in the everyday flow of care: specimen jars, IV lines, pill packets, wrapped cutlery, packaged sandwiches. Single-use disposable medical plastics became particularly abundant from the 1970s onwards. Convenience, sterility, disposability — these were the promises plastic made.

Despite the mounting evidence of environmental damage, microplastics in marine life, and endocrine disruptors in our bloodstreams, plastic consumption continues to grow. Efforts to reduce, recycle, and innovate alternatives remain commendable but partial. The deeper question lingers: why use plastic at all?

After all, glassware can be sterilised. Cloth gowns can be laundered. Salads and sandwiches do not need to be shrink-wrapped. So why are they?

The Plastic Veil: Trust, Anonymity and The Disposability of Care

Plastic prevents contamination and performs purity. The sound of a packet tearing gives reassurance that what’s inside is untouched. A scalpel sealed in polyethylene arrives unsullied from machine to hand. Plastic is not just a barrier — it is a guarantor of integrity. It assures us this object is just for me, uncorrupted by other bodies. We distrust the unwrapped. We crave the seal. More than hygienic, plastic is anti-anxiolytic.

Anthropologist Marcel Mauss, writing a century ago, described how gift exchange in small-scale societies was governed by obligations to give, receive, and reciprocate. These exchanges were thick in social meaning. But in today’s world of mass-produced medical supplies and hyper-anonymous transactions, reciprocity is outsourced. Plastic steps in as a proxy for trust. It allows strangers to give and receive without relationship, without history, without risk.

Hospitals, much like airport departure lounges, are full of rushed encounters: overworked staff, understaffed wards, patients met for mere minutes. In this context, plastic does not just protect — it anonymises. It creates the illusion of purity and predictability in a world that is neither. It wraps not only objects, but moral responsibility. In a theatre of fleeting encounters, in a workplace thinly bound by norms rather than thick social ties, plastic is both material and metaphor — a means of care that distances carers from those cared for.

Have we become addicted to single-use plastic not for its function, but for its symbolic value? Plastic wrapping allows clinicians to extend care without knowing who came before or after. In systems with neither time nor intimacy to build thick bonds of trust, where care work is precarious and underpaid, plastic lubricates transient encounters and keeps the machine in motion. If a syringe is single-use and sealed, no one need ask if the autoclave was turned on. With plastic doing the work, questioning trust and asking names is unnecessary between strangers in scrubs. Healthcare staff may come and go, but plastic is a constant.

We sealed off risk with plastic, and in doing so, unsealed our ties to one another. As hygiene and trust were outsourced to disposables, so too was care work and the human behind it. The plastic veil covered the instrument and erased the person holding it. The work endured, but the worker became as replaceable as the glove. Plastic made medicine cleaner. It also made it lonelier.

Saving lives without asking what kind of world we are saving, and at what planetary cost, is treacherous. If plastic is the balm that allows strangers to care for one another without connection, then reducing our reliance on it may demand not just new materials, but new relationships. It will demand deeper accountability, thicker bonds, and a willingness to reimagine hygiene not as insulation from others, but as care among them. We must rebuild systems that value continuity over dispensability, relationships over replacement, and care as presence rather than protocol.

We rarely ask who made the syringe, who wrapped the scalpel, or where the plastic waste will go once discarded. The plastic veil spares us from asking, absolves us from knowing, and shelters us from the responsibility of …

Here’s the real punchline: our most dazzling technological interventions often pale in comparison to nature’s slow-cooked brilliance. We keep trying to “outsmart” biology, distilling, isolating, and patenting what evolution has already finessed. But more often than not, our shortcuts get us lost. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the world of agriculture, food, and medicine.

The first signs of technological innovation
As an anthropologist, I take a wide lens on human biological and technological diversity. The archaeological record suggests we should be sober about making claims about human ingenuity and technological aptitude. The earliest evidence of our ancestors making stone tools is about 2.9 million years ago. They made Oldowan tools by smashing rocks for cutting, scraping and pounding. Fossil evidence shows that our ancestors relied on Oldowan tools for a very long time before they turned to an upgrade. It looks like it took 1.2 million years of trial and error before our ancestors upgraded to Acheulean tools, which resemble the symmetrical looking stone tool in the middle of the image below. So while Tech experts might say, “We’ll solve everything with innovation!” Just remember: it took us over a million years to sharpen both sides of a rock.

It then took another 1.4 million years to realise the shards we chipped off the big rocks could be used for arrowheads, fish hooks and more. That’s not exactly what one might call a tech revolution. That’s more like a software update delivered by a glacier.

Fast-forward to the Fertile Crescent 11,000 years ago where humans start developing agriculture as we recognise it today. Simulation studies suggest it could have taken just 20–30 years to domesticate wild wheat and barley using “primitive” methods. Instead, the archaeological record shows it took us 3,000 years. So our first great agricultural breakthrough was basically procrastination with snacks.

Sure, agriculture gave us bread and beer—but it also gifted us with:

• Nutritional decline
• Tooth decay
• Back-breaking labour
• Social inequality
• Infectious diseases
• …and the concept of tax season

So put simply, agricultural technology invented Mondays! We invented bread… and then had to invent reasons to lie down.

Shortly after we invented bread, nature made it mouldy. But, true to form, we didn’t discover the penicillin in mouldy bread until 1928. Penicillin finally went into mass production in 1940. While human technology took the scenic route, bacteria took the express train to “nope”. By 1942, bacteria developed resistance to penicillin. So, it took us almost 2 million years to make a better stone tool, but only about 2 years to break antibiotics. That’s like taking centuries to invent a bicycle and then immediately riding it into a lake.

Let’s turn to some examples of how technology doesn’t always make us healthier, sometimes it just makes our funerals more punctual. Calcium in our diet is great for bones and teeth, and when scientists noticed it also seemed to help prevent atherosclerosis, they turned it into a technology: calcium supplements. The result? Increased risk for incident coronary artery calcification (CAC) among their participants. Nature said, “Eat your leafy greens.” Technology said, “Nah, we’ll put it in a tablet.” And just like that, we reinvented the kidney stone.

Observational studies suggest diets rich in vitamin E seem to protect against heart disease and cancer. Biology gave us vitamin E in leafy greens and nuts. Technology concentrated it, patented it, and made it so potent it could bench-press your left ventricle into retirement. The idea was simple: take what’s good in food, put it in a pill, save lives. Instead, it was like trying to prevent frostbite by climbing into a freezer.

If biology is a wise old grandmother, technology is her overconfident teenage grandson who thinks he can “improve” her recipe by swapping the ingredients for Monster Energy and glitter. At high enough doses, your multivitamin can turn into a Choose Your Own Adventure… with all endings marked “organ failure.” High doses of vitamin A can cause birth defects, too much vitamin B6 can fry your nerves, and large doses of vitamin B3 can take out your liver. Turns out, “more is better” only works for frequent flyer points, not vitamins.

Bioactives are another example of where nature serves us a healthy 5 course meal wrapped in fibre, hybdration, and a suite of phytochemicals that all work in harmony to support our immune, cardiovascular and nervous systems, and humans thought they could do better with ChatGPT. Diets rich in β-carotene seem to lower cancer rates, especially lung cancer. Thinking they could do better, scientists gave β-carotene supplements to smokers… and had to halt the study when cancer rates and deaths went up. Scientists found out the hard way that giving β-carotene supplements to smokers is like trying to heat your house by handing matches to a pyromaniac.

We stripped lycopene from tomatoes, turned it into supplements… and got the nutritional equivalent of a Myspace page.

Nature: “High cholesterol? Eat a tomato.”

Technology: “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

Allicin is another fascinating bioactive that is released when you crush fresh garlic. Garlic pills skip that step and just turn Allium sativum into garlic-flavoured fairy dust. Scientists basically built a Ferrari out of Lego and wondered why it didn’t win Le Mans.

EGCG from green tea? Nature made it anti-inflammatory in a nice cup of tea. We packaged it in a capsule and turned it into acute liver disease. Basically, We took “ahh” and turned it into “AAAHH!”

The Pattern’s clear: biology spends millions of years perfecting bioactives in food… and we strip them out, concentrate them, and somehow make them less effective. It’s like taking a beautiful symphony and turning it into a ringtone.

Pesticides are another example of where we keep picking fights with nature… and losing.

DDT was going to wipe out mosquitoes — instead we basically just sent them to crossfit. They evolved resistance and now they laugh at us in the key of organochlorine.

We sprayed Glyphosate trying to end weeds… and now we have superweeds as well as a form of Lymphona that Hodgkins won’t take the credit for.

Neonic pesticides were going to make our crops safe from pests. Instead we ended up zapping bees and other beneficial insects in the process. Which is like fixing a leaky roof by burning down the house. Pesticides were our way of saying to biology, ‘We’re in charge now.’ And biology responded, ‘Cute.’

So, did Team Biology win the debate? Technically, yes, we got the most votes. But really, the win belongs to biology. After all, life on this planet has been R&D’ing for 3.5 billion years without a marketing budget, a patent lawyer, or a TED Talk.

The lesson? Technology is amazing, but biology isn’t just a competitor. Nature is the blueprint, the teacher, and occasionally, the comedian in the room. Every time we think we’ve outsmarted nature, we eventually discover we’ve just enrolled in her next masterclass.

Would I do another science comedy debate? Absolutely. Because if there’s one thing this night proved, it’s that laughing at our own mistakes might just be the most human technology of all.

The overpopulation fail-safe is hidden in plain sight, lurking, dormant within the bodies of a quarter of the world’s population. The name of this failsafe is tuberculosis infection, or TBI, an inactive contamination carried in two billion people worldwide, 95% of whom are found in low- and middle-income countries.  

People with TBI carry tuberculosis disease but are asymptomatic. Most people with TBI do not become sick and thus infectious. The switch turning a tuberculosis infection into active tuberculosis disease, in most cases, is malnutrition. Famine in North Korea between 1994 and 1998, for example, led to a 7-fold increase in tuberculosis. Overcrowded housing, air pollution and lack of health care help spread the disease. But, for the moment, people with TBI are walking around disease-free unaware of the sleeping microbe inside them. 

The Malthusian argument about overpopulation is that resources will become scarce as populations outgrow the carrying capacity of their territories. If healthy food, safe water and living standards decrease, then low- and middle-income countries will be hit first and hardest. The lack of food security and the high number of people living with TBI make these countries particularly vulnerable. Famine will trigger tuberculosis infections to become active tuberculosis cases. Deaths from tuberculosis and associated illnesses will be set to skyrocket and global population could potentially drop by up to a quarter within a very short space of time. 

Up until COVID-19 claimed the unflattering title of biggest global infectious killer, tuberculosis was the leading cause of mortality from an infectious disease worldwide outranking incurable conditions such as HIV / AIDS. In 2020, for example, 15% of the 10 million people worldwide who became sick with tuberculosis died from the disease. Sadly, the 2022 Global TB report showed TB incidence is on the rise. Tuberculosis is treatable, however, and should be nowhere near the top of these charts. Have elites been leaving tuberculosis untreated in low-income countries as an overpopulation failsafe?  

Keeping tuberculosis as a failsafe to curb population size is positively eugenic. Frontline healthcare staff caring for tuberculosis patients are not to blame. Rich governments provide tuberculosis healthcare programs with enough money to appear charitable but not enough to help them eradicate tuberculosis in their communities. This funding environment maintains the circulation of tuberculosis within communities thus ensuring high numbers of people with TBI.  

While community-wide screening in high income countries helped to reduce tuberculosis in high-income countries like Australia and The Netherlands, similar strategies have not been rolled out in low- and middle-income countries, with a province of Vietnam being one of the few exceptions. As a result, tuberculosis is uncommon in high-income countries but relatively common elsewhere. If global famine hits, high-income countries are largely protected but the other countries go down the gurgler. 

Using tuberculosis as an overpopulation failsafe is morally unpalatable. Is there some kind of evil genius at work here? It’s hard to point the finger at world leaders for something they have not done. By feigning ignorance, turning a blind eye or misdirecting attention, world leaders can attempt to abrogate responsibility. They will not even need to lift a finger to use tuberculosis to execute the overpopulation failsafe. Increasing prevalence of tuberculosis will appear like a natural, biological tragedy. Unless we hold them accountable now, world leaders will be able to throw their arms up and say, “Look, no hands!”  

If concerns about overpopulation and carbon emissions are to be taken seriously, then the 2010s represent a decade of lost opportunities. Indeed, the issues of pollution and population are coupled. A 2009 study by Thomas Wire at the London school of Economics (LSE) showed that for every seven US dollars spent on basic family planning, carbon dioxide emissions could be reduced by one tonne. Less people, less carbon dioxide. Owing China carbon credits for the one-child policy, however, is not a popular thought. 

Figure 1: Population growth mapped against observed global mean surface temperature change from 1850 to 2020 (data from IPCC report 2021).   

The same year that Thomas Wire was making his calculations at LSE, a conference was held at UCLA entitled The World in 2050: A Scientific Investigation of the Impact of Global Population Growth on a Divided Planet. Experts estimated that there were 78 million more births than deaths that year but over 80 million unintended pregnancies. Hypothetically, were it possible to empower people to avoid unintended pregnancies across the globe, then supposedly population growth could have been turned into population decline.  

With the oral contraceptive pill soon to go off patent, spirits were high. However, big pharmaceutical companies worked to keep steroidal contraceptives available only through medical prescription despite little if any medical justification for this cautionary action. Keeping steroidal contraceptives available only through medical prescription enables the pharmaceutical companies to exploit doctors as their unpaid sales force, whilst at the same time maintaining a relatively high price for a product that is off patent. Oral contraception being out of reach for women and completely unavailable for men contributes to 121 million unintended pregnancies each year. Avoiding unwanted pregnancies could potentially more than cancel out the annual 90 million more births than deaths each year. 

Solving climate change by curbing population growth is not a singular answer. After all, 95% of population growth occurs in low- and middle-income countries while high-income countries produce upwards of 86% of carbon emissions. Offsetting consumption in high-income countries by reducing population growth in low-income countries is not an equatable solution. Furthermore, holding mothers morally accountable for the future carbon emissions of their children is an unethical position. People in high-income countries cannot keep consuming at current levels and expect the problem to be solved by parents in low-income countries having less children. 

So, is a child the biggest carbon footprint a person can have? Education, late marriage, access to contraception, safe abortion, and family planning are important in their own right. As an added benefit, these measures not only help to keep population in check, these measures also help to reduce carbon emissions. Making every child a wanted child is desirable and technologically possible. Cultural, religious and political barriers have not been the only obstacles. The profit-driven interests of large multinational pharmaceutical companies have also stood in the way. Even if the population question and carbon fumes were not an issue, isn’t denying people access to their reproductive rights, in and of itself, a human rights abuse? 

An infographic I recently stumbled across stated that “reading one hour per day in your chosen field will make you an international expert in 7 years.” Now, I don’t know if that’s true, but it certainly motivates me to put down my smartphone and pick up a book.

To drive my reading behaviour, I use carrots and sticks. I think about the rewards, weigh up the consequences, and set myself goals. One way to drive my active reading is to write reviews about books in my field. Writing book reviews offers a chance to keep up to date with current scholarship in my field, develop my comprehension and analytical skills, and publish work that demonstrates my engagement with a specialised area of research. Often, writing a book review for an academic journal also means receiving a free copy of the book (but sadly, not always). This post is targeted at postgraduate and early career researchers who are looking to review a non-fiction book for an academic journal.

My first book review was unplanned. I was conducting fieldwork in Brazil and picked up The Power of Place during a rare visit to an English language bookstore. I loved the book so much, I wrote about it to encourage other people to read it. I was fortunate to have senior colleagues who kindly proofread my review and gave me useful feedback. The Journal of Anthropology and Medicine peer-reviewed my unsolicited review for publication in 2009. I did not know then that my review of The Power of Place would frequently become my most downloaded article on academia.edu even some 7 years later (though I’m not sure how to interpret that statistic).

One of the most rewarding experiences of reviewing The Power of Place was that the author, Harm de Blij, actually wrote to me after reading my review and said:

I am deeply appreciative of your carefully considered review and especially so because your global experiences inform an unusually insightful commentary.
Harm de Blij, 2009

After publishing my first book review, I received invitations from editors of other journals to review books relevant to my research. This was particularly helpful in my postdoctoral research where reviewing books was a way to fast-track my engagement with a new topic of research. Furthermore, I was able to capitalise upon time that would have otherwise been wasted (such as waiting at bus stops or sitting/standing on trains). Catching public transport to work in Sydney means I spend about 12.5 hours a week on buses and trains. If the carriage isn’t too packed, I can use this time to read and reflect upon my area of research. When I started postdoctoral research on tuberculosis I needed to get up to speed on the latest social science research on infectious disease and demonstrate my critical engagement with the literature. Reading and reviewing academic books for peer-reviewed journals afforded me that opportunity, and as a bonus, this also meant that I received free books.

Writing a book review is a chance to improve your understanding of a particular field of research, to add a publication to your CV, and demonstrate expertise in a field. Additionally, summarising and evaluating a book will expand your skillset as well as offer an opportunity to network with senior colleagues. Sharing your book review with the author, for example, is an excuse to make contact and establish rapport. Also, potential employers might read your book review as it might say something about your ability for critical thought and effective communication in an eloquent and diplomatic manner.

An academic book review serves to bring a work of non-fiction to the attention of colleagues in the field. Generally only recently published books are reviewed. Occasionally historical texts are reviewed, such as An Essay on the Principle of Population, which was reviewed in Nature by Professor Roger Short on the 200^th anniversary of its original publication. Academic book reviews are often read by a knowledgeable audience. For those who haven’t had time to read the book, the review is often a really handy resource. A good book review will help specialists in the field decide whether or not they should read the book. Book reviews inform readers about the actual contents of the book, specify the central focus, outline its main contents, indicate its precise usefulness, and outline the significance of the book and the theoretical and methodological questions it might raise. Reviewers should develop an argued and critical response to the book and situate it within the historiography of the field. For those who may have already read the book, the review is often a useful refresher as well as a great way to critically reflect upon the content.

How long does it take you to read a book? How long does it take you to write a review?

If you accept an invitation to write a book review, the journal editor will specify how long you have before you have to submit your review. Generally, they give the reviewer around two or three months. This may seem like a generous amount of time but don’t dilly daddle. Non-fiction takes longer to read than fiction and the content may challenge you in unexpected ways. Start reading the book as soon as you receive it and make sure you mark interesting quotes and your reflections along the way. I might be slow, but it generally takes me anywhere up to an hour to read maybe 10,000 words (a fairly standard chapter size for books in my field) and then a day or two to write up the review. Each person is different. Know thy reading and writing speed. Plan ahead.

Only select journals accept unsolicited reviews. Many journals have a book reviews editor. If you’re interested in writing reviews on a particular area of research, it is worth writing to a couple of book reviews editors to let them know your interests. Some journals publish a list of books received. Make sure you consult the most recent list of books received and check the new lists regularly. Be proactive, take initiative, and contact the book reviews editor or the journal editor to express your interest in reviewing a book. This can be to indicate your general interest in reviewing books, e.g. “I am interested in reviewing any forthcoming books on tuberculosis”, or to indicate interest in reviewing a particular book, “I am interested in reviewing Free Market Tuberculosis by Erin Koch.” Approach editors one at a time (i.e. don’t contact two editors from different journals at once to ask to review the same book—asking to do a book review and then having to cancel on your request will only frustrate time-poor journal editors).

As soon as you receive the book, start reading it. I generally use two bookmarks, one to mark my page and one for the index. My bookmarks also double as rulers to underline key sentences. Use pencil. You might like to use stickynotes to mark key passages. As you read the book, keep the following questions in mind:

• What is the general topic of study?
• What issues are addressed?
• What contribution does the book make to a particular field of study?
• What are the author’s key arguments?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the book?
• What audience is the book aimed at? i.e. Who is the book for?
• What are the highlights of the book?
• Is it worthwhile for others to read it?
• How is this book situated in a particular field of study?
• Does the book support or challenge existing scholarship in the field?
• How do the key arguments support or contradict existing scholarship?

Also, keep a scrap piece of notepaper in the back of the book to write down ideas as you read.

To prepare to write your book review, I recommend reading previous reviews of other books in the journal you are writing for to get a feel for the tenor of reviews this journal publishes as well as to understand formatting and style. You may also have a look to see if anyone else has reviewed the same book for other journals or online websites (e.g. blogs). Look at what others are saying about the book, because their review might alert you to themes you had missed, inspire you on how you wish to frame your review, or even give you an indication of the way the book has been received within a discipline.

Most journals will have guidelines for book reviews. Some reviews are short (100-500 words), most reviews are between 800 and 1,500 words. Make sure you follow the guidelines on headings, references, footnotes and endnotes (some journals only allow you to reference the book you are reviewing, most journals do not use footnotes or endnotes for a book review).

Think about your audience. Several reviews for the same book will look different depending on the journal in which they are published. Free Market Tuberculosis by Erin Koch, for example, has been reviewed in several journals including Medical Anthropology Quarterly, American Anthropologist, Women’s Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, Global Public Health, and an online academic blog. Imagine, if you will, how a review of this book would have to be written for a scientific journal, an area studies journal, or a history of science journal. Each review has to cater to the readership of the website/journal in which it is published.

Overall Content of a book review:

An academic book review should focus on summarising and evaluating a work of non-fiction. Your evaluation is best oriented towards content, structure, and the author’s arguments. Occasional typing errors can usually be forgiven. If  you really feel the need to criticise the author’s writing style or the editorial work on the book, remain polite (e.g. a sound attempt to be comprehensive compromised the flow of the book). Advance your own ideas in academic articles, not book reviews. Avoid making personal comments about the author. Try to share balanced opinions. Avoid being overly critical and avoid being too full of praise. Making a comment on the price of the book, if it is too expensive, will use up words and chew up space that could be dedicated to engaging with content. Here’s my checklist for content:

• summarise the author’s argument clearly and objectively
• articulate the theoretical approach and the range of material covered
• critically evaluate key themes as well as the selection and interpretation of material
• identify any biases and describe the consequences and shortcomings or possibly justify the bias
  • g. The reliance on quantitative data is understandable given the author’s training and experience in mathematical modelling, but fails to address the qualitative dimensions of human experience.
• describe and explain any criticism and appraisal
• evaluate the book’s major contribution to the field
• state which target audience would benefit most from reading this text
  • Try to offer a revealing point of view from which the book can be perceived critically.

Book review structure:
The structure of a book review is like any essay: Introduction, body of essay, and conclusion. There are two principal options for the organisation of the body of the review: (1) You can review the book chapter by chapter or (2) you can review the book thematically. Edited volumes can be lengthier and more heterogeneous (sometimes almost cacophonous). It is generally easier to review edited volumes chapter by chapter.

• Your opening paragraph will possibly include:
  • a brief statement about the author
  • a description of the purpose of the book
  • a comment about the relationship between this work and others by the same author, the same subject and the same genre
• The body of the review should be organized into paragraphs that deal with single aspects of the book. This arrangement can work chronologically through the book or you can organise your paragraphs more usefully by themes, methods, or other elements of the book
  • Summarise before you criticise
  • Be charitable in your summary, taking the book on its own terms.
  • Were there any memorable quotes worthy of sharing?
  • (Avoid excessive quotation)
  • When you voice your own analysis, criticisms and reservations, try to articulate these thoughts in a way that other professionals will find helpful. Pair your assertions with evidence.
  • Make suggestions about how the argument might have been improved, how the selection of primary and secondary sources could have been more effective, or what other works might address the same topics in better ways.
• The last paragraph (the conclusion) includes:
  • a final overall assessment of the book
  • highlight the most useful/informative sections of the book
  • an evaluation of the significance of the work
  • relate the work to other scholarship in the discipline
  • possibly make a statement of recommendation

Be critical but remain collegial. A book review is not a blind review. Be mindful that the review is published under your name and that the writer may one day become a colleague or employer. Remember that someone has taken the time and effort to make a substantial contribution to the field by researching and writing a book. Non-fiction can be very difficult to write and very easy to criticise. Demonstrate that you can be insightful and constructive without being mean. Saying what a book does not do can be a cheap shot, so only criticise what a book does not do if you have sufficient reason (e.g. ignoring a whole body of research on XYZ means that this book limits its analysis to ABC). In some instances, mentioning oversights can form an important part of a review. For example, Nir Avieli’s review of an edited volume on Vietnam found a discrepancy between what the book claimed to do and what it actually did. “While criticizing a book for not encompassing everything is unfair,” Avieli courteously acknowledged, “the project’s claim at depicting Vietnamese urban culture should be accepted with reservation.”

Three common traps:

• Obsequiousness
  • Don’t just wax lyrical about how much you enjoyed reading the book
• Imperiousness
  • Book reviews are not a place to jump at every opportunity to reprimand an author over anything from incorrect citations to misplaced commas.
• Conceitedness
  • A book review is not an excuse to demonstrate your intellectual superiority.
  • A book review is not the time to describe how you could have written a better book on the subject

Proofreading a book review

Number one proofreading tip for book reviews: Try not to start every sentence with the author’s name or the title. As with any piece of writing, try to find someone else who can offer you their time to read your work. Try to be as open and receptive to their ideas without taking feedback personally. Creating an open, honest environment for someone to share their views and opinions of your writing is really helpful.

Reading your own work with new eyes is difficult. However, make sure you do read your book review aloud before sending it to a journal. Also, you can use the search function in your word processing program to help you. Search for mistakes that you commonly make. My advice is to also search and rephrase expressions such as “It is”, “This is”, “There is”. For example, putting a noun between “This” and “is” makes the subject of a sentence clearer. Don’t overuse conjunctives. Be sparing with words such as “however”, “thus”, “therefore”, “conversely”, “similarly”, etc.

There are lots of different formats for book reviews. For example, a review of a popular science book might be more narrative in style and be better published in a popular science magazine. A book review for a blog might be more relaxed than a book review for a peer-reviewed journal. Comparative reviews are another type of book review. A comparative review involves reviewing two books simultaneously. Occasionally, reviewers can even be asked to review more than two books at a time. A comparative book review is not about which book is better, but how two (or more) books speak to each other. What themes overlap? Where do they agree? How can different perspectives be reconciled? What are the respective contributions of each book?

Finally, once your review is published, Tweet it, share it on facebook, put a self-archived copy on academia.edu and another on researchgate, and send a copy to the author. If you like the book, you might hope to collaborate with the author one day. Two authors whose books I reviewed ended up contributing to a journal symposium I collated for the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry. Another author kindly served as a peer-reviewer. Book reviews are a great opportunity to develop skills in comprehension, critical analysis, and writing. I strongly recommend postgraduates and early career researchers to have a go at reading and writing a review of a book in your field.

I certainly have not adhered to a strict formula in writing book reviews. Links to my various book reviews can be found here.

The virtual book launch for a children’s book about tuberculosis is happening today! Using crowdfunding the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research have successfully raised over $AUD 6,000 to publish, print and distribute copies of this book in Vietnamese throughout the province of Ca Mau. Here is the audio version and voila pdf copies in
English: A book about tuberculosis for children written by Paul Mason and illustrated by Amelia Darmawan (published 24 March 2016).
Tagalog: May Sakit Si Len at Si Alex
French: Un livre sur la tuberculose pour les enfants
Portuguese: Francis e Renê estão doentes
Vietnamese: Phuong va An bi benh

To commemorate World TB day, the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry has published a special journal symposium on tuberculosis.

“What we have is a crisis of imagination,” Peter Buffett urges. “Albert Einstein said that you cannot solve a problem with the same mind-set that created it” (Peter Buffett 2013, 14), and thus we cannot address the global issue of TB (and so many other diseases) without addressing the underlying socioeconomic system in which it thrives. Without addressing the poverty that created it and the poverty created from it.

TB is not something alien, not a disease of an “other.” It is my disease. It is our disease. This issue of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, with a symposium on tuberculosis edited by Paul H. Mason and Chris Degeling and in honour of World TB Day 2016, underscores this. It examines the intersections of narratives of TB from multiple disciplines and diverse perspectives. It emphasizes the “deeply personal story” that is TB, even as the global disease burden and efforts at eradication continue to seem daunting (Mason and Degeling 2016).

Leigh E. Rich
Department of Health Sciences (Public Health)
Armstrong State University, 2016

The editorial for the journal symposium on TB & ethics by Chris Degeling and I can be found here: Beyond Biomedicine: Relationships and Care in Tuberculosis Prevention.

Reciprocity and Ethical Tuberculosis Treatment and Control by Diego Silva, Angus Dawson, and Ross Upshur:

This paper explores the notion of reciprocity in the context of active pulmonary and laryngeal tuberculosis (TB) treatment and related control policies and practices. We seek to do three things: First, we sketch the background to contemporary global TB care and suggest that poverty is a key feature when considering the treatment of TB patients. We use two examples from TB care to explore the role of reciprocity: isolation and the use of novel TB drugs. Second, we explore alternative means of justifying the use of reciprocity through appeal to different moral and political theoretical traditions (i.e., virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism). We suggest that each theory can be used to provide reasons to take reciprocity seriously as an independent moral concept, despite any other differences. Third, we explore general meanings and uses of the concept of reciprocity, with the primary intention of demonstrating that it cannot be simply reduced to other more frequently invoked moral concepts such as beneficence or justice. We argue that reciprocity can function as a mid-level principle in public health, and generally, captures a core social obligation arising once an individual or group is burdened as a result of acting for the benefit of others (even if they derive a benefit themselves). We conclude that while more needs to be explored in relation to the theoretical justification and application of reciprocity, sufficient arguments can be made for it to be taken more seriously as a key principle within public health ethics and bioethics more generally.

Ethical Responsibility for the Social Production of Tuberculosis by Seiji Yamada, Sheldon Riklon, Gregory G. Maskarinec

Approximately one in two hundred persons in the Marshall Islands have active tuberculosis (TB). We examine the historical antecedents of this situation in order to assign ethical responsibility for the present situation. Examining the antecedents in terms of Galtung’s dialectic of personal versus structural violence, we can identify instances in the history of the Marshall Islands when individual subjects made decisions (personal violence) with large-scale ecologic, social, and health consequences. The roles of medical experimenters, military commanders, captains of the weapons industry in particular, and industrial capitalism in general (as the cause of global warming) are examined. In that, together with Lewontin, we also identify industrial capitalism as the cause of tuberculosis, we note that the distinction between personal versus structural violence is difficult to maintain. By identifying the cause of the tuberculosis in the Marshall Islands, we also identify what needs be done to treat and prevent it.

From Exceptional to Liminal Subjects: Reconciling Tensions in the Politics of Tuberculosis and Migration by Jed Horner

Controlling the movement of potentially infectious bodies has been central to Australian immigration law. Nowhere is this more evident than in relation to tuberculosis (TB), which is named as a ground for refusal of a visa in the Australian context. In this paper, I critically examine the “will to knowledge” that this gives rise to. Drawing on a critical analysis of texts, including interviews with migrants diagnosed with TB and healthcare professionals engaged in their care (n=19), I argue that this focus on border policing, rather than resettlement and the broader social determinants of health that drive current rates of TB, paradoxically renders migrants diagnosed with TB as liminal subjects in the post-arrival phase. This raises ethical issues about who “matters,” as well as dilemmas about what constitutes adequate care for the “Other,” both of which go to the heart of the political economy of migration.

On TB Vaccines, Patients’ Demands, and Modern Printed Media in Times of Biomedical Uncertainties: Buenos Aires, 1920–1950 by Diego Armus

Reconstructing some of the experiences of people living with tuberculosis in Argentina in the first half of the twentieth century, as reflected not only in written and oral accounts but also in individual and collective actions, this article explores the ways in which patients came to grips with medical expertise in times of biomedical uncertainty. These negotiations, which inevitably included adaptations as well as confrontations, highlight a much less passive and submissive patient–physician relationship than is often assumed. Though patients were certainly subordinate to medical doctors’ knowledge and practices, that subordination, far from absolute, was limited and often overthrown. The article focuses on patients’ demands to gain access to a vaccine not approved by the medical establishment. By engaging with media organizations, the sick invoked their “right to health” in order to obtain access to experimental treatments when biomedicine was unable to deliver efficient therapies.

Negotiating “The Social” and Managing Tuberculosis in Georgia by Erin Koch

In this paper I utilize anthropological insights to illuminate how health professionals and patients navigate and negotiate what for them is social about tuberculosis in order to improve treatment outcomes and support patients as human beings. I draw on ethnographic research about the implementation of the DOTS (Directly Observed Therapy, Short Course) approach in Georgia’s National Tuberculosis Program in the wake of the Soviet healthcare system. Georgia is a particularly unique context for exploring these issues given the country’s rich history of medical professionalism and the insistence that the practice of medicine is a moral commitment to society. I argue for critical attention to the ways in which treatment recipients and providers navigate what, for them, is “social” about therapeutic practices and their significance for avoiding biological and social reductionism.

Book review:
Development and Public Health in the Himalaya: Reflections on Healing in Contemporary Nepal by Ian Harper reviewed by Paul H. Mason.

TB CASE STUDY by Jane Carroll:
https://bioethicalinquiry.com/the-ethics-of-isolation-for-patients-with-tuberculosis-in-australia/

WHAT HAPPENS IF MIGRANTS ARE DETECTED WITH TB BEFORE THEY MIGRATE? by Dinh Thi Nhung:
https://bioethicalinquiry.com/what-happens-if-migrants-are-detected-with-tb-before-they-migrate/

RECIPROCITY AND MULTIDRUG-RESISTANT TUBERCULOSIS, J.-G. Cho, A. L. Byrne, G. Radford, M. Keller, C. C. Dobler (Response by Australian clinicians):
https://bioethicalinquiry.com/reciprocity-and-multidrug-resistant-tuberculosis/

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11673-016-9707-3

Effective Therapeutic Relationships Using Psychodynamic Psychotherapy in the Face of Trauma, by Shaun Halovic:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11673-016-9701-9

Ethics, Tuberculosis, and Compassion: Lessons From Praxis, by Justin Denholm:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11673-015-9693-x

And to finish this post, a scene from George Bernard’s Shaws, The Doctor’s Dilemma:
In this scene we meet Dr Ridgeon and Mrs Jennifer Dubedat. Dr Ridgeon has gained fame and honours for an innovative tuberculosis treatment. Mrs Dubedat, whose husband has TB, actively seeks an audience with Dr Ridgeon, despite the doctor’s refusal to see any patients other than the few he has selected for his study. She begs the doctor to cure her young husband, a talented artist who, as we learn later, is devoid of morality. Ridgeon must decide what sort of patient is most worthy of the limited treatment available. Before and after this scene, conversations with physician colleagues provide multiple perspectives on this situation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssneDq5i4xU

The title of the article, “Anthropologist? You’re hired!”, is perhaps a little unfortunate because it suggests that the main issue is the employability of anthropologists (always an interesting topic) but the discussion focused much more on what anthropologists have to offer in dealing with a range of globally pressing concerns. For Eriksen, it is anthropology’s capacity to link local contexts with broader scales that allows anthropologists to make a unique contribution to decision making processes. For Bell, who leads a research team at technology firm INTEL, anthropologists can intervene in and humanise design processes by understanding how technologies are cultural artefacts that coalesce various fears and desires. Breidenbach links her anthropological perspectives to the crowdfunding philanthropic site, Betterplace.org. She emphasises the complex, contextual and multi-faceted perspectives that anthropologists bring to real world problems and the capacity that they have to build bridges between academia and the public (although I would add, somewhat wryly, that this seems to work much better in theory than in practice).

These kinds of discussions are interesting for me because they seem to revolve around a tension between the capacity of anthropologists to “talk back” to powerful institutional discourses and our desire to make our knowledge “useful” to precisely these institutions. If our primary capacity  is to provide the sort of nuance, context and complexity of “the local” that challenge the schematic view-from-above of institutions — in essence, a type of critique —  how do we convince these very institutions that these perspectives are useful to them? And what does it mean when they indeed recognise our gadfly interventions as “operationalisable”, to use a horrible term?

Come to think of it, perhaps the title of the article is actually on the money, so to speak, because in the end this comes down to anthropologists attempting to convince others to give us a job. And to do this we have to make a convincing argument that we are adding value in some sense. So the question behind this is not specifically why the “world” needs anthropologists, but why specific employers need us. Of course, this is a worthwhile question to ask — I’m all for anthropologists having jobs. And maybe we can make the world a better place by bringing more subtlety and nuance, and a multiplicity of perspectives, to decision making processes, whether they involve development initiatives, climate change policies, or the design of commodities. But I think we should probably also be up front about our self interest and to critically reflect on how this shapes how we frame the discussion.

For example, there seems to be a vaguely utopian promise running through the discussion: if only we can bring more subtlety, nuance, multifaceted perspectives etc into the decision making process, then we will have a more satisfactory, humanised, truly democratic etc outcome. This might be true. I, for one, often find myself thinking along these lines. But we might also question the assumption that the kind of knowledge anthropologists produce is inherently positive — that revealing the complexity of “the local” is an inherently good thing — particularly when our final obligation is to whomever is paying our salary.

I should emphasise that I don’t have a problem with trying to work out how anthropology can be made useful in various contexts, or trying to convince others of our inherent usefulness. At the same time I think that the discussion of “why the world needs anthropologists” should be broader than this, although I’m not entirely sure that I know how to express what I mean. Maybe I’m referring to the capacity of anthropology to do more than merely provide a more humane version of capitalism. Maybe I’m referring for its capacity as anthropology — the science of human possibility —  to provide the sort of critique of the contemporary that is not operationalisable in a narrow sense, but which instead provides truly alternative visions of ways to be human.

This would, I think, mean retaining (or resurrecting) anthropology’s grand — even megalomaniac — claims to be a universal science of the human. It would mean seeing our project as more than merely providing “context” or nuance, or “bringing culture in” to instrumentalist discourses. It would mean that we are involved in doing more than ethnography. In writing this, I realise that I might be arguing along similar lines to Tim Ingold, when he admonishes that anthropology should not be reduced to or equated with ethnography. Indeed, he sees this reduction as itself contributing to the decline of anthropology’s public voice.

In order to retain this broader vision of anthropology and its project, I think we need to be careful not to make our claims too “reasonable”. By this I mean justifying what we do in terms of other discourses, or arguing for our usefulness. Yes, this is an inherent aspect of being in the world and participating in a broader culture, but I think we should also hold on to the claims of a discipline that is in a sense self-positing, which provides its own reason for being, its own ground, and does not seek its meaning in terms of its service to other projects. This is a highly unreasonable, excessive, claim. But maybe the world needs that, too.

So perhaps the question that we should be asking is not, “Why does the world need anthropologists?” but rather, “Why does the world need anthropology?”

Anthropologist? You’re hired!

The 2015 annual conference of the Australian Anthropological Society (AAS) will be hosted by the Anthropology Programme at the University of Melbourne from 1-4 December. This year’s conference “Moral Horizons” will address moral pluralities both within anthropological practice and in the rapidly evolving world the discipline researches.

Melbourne University will be hosting the annual conference of the Australian Anthropological Society this year. The plenary speakers are  Michael Lambek (University of Toronto), Nancy Scheper-Hughes (University of California, Berkeley), and Annelise Riles (Cornell Law School). The Distinguished Lecture will be given by Associate Professor Martha Macintyre (The University of Melbourne) on Tuesday 1, December, from 5.30pm to 7.00pm at the Carillo Gantner Theatre, Sidney Myer Asia Centre, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia. To browse the panels, timetable and events, check out the conference website: https://www.nomadit.co.uk/aas/aas2015/

As this blog is maintained by the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University, allow me to flag some of the events and sessions that current and former Macquarie University anthropology staff will be involved in:

At 11h00 to 12h30 On Wednesday 2 December, Jaap Timmer and Matt Tomlinson will convene a session on the social formation of wonder with Michael W. Scott from the London School of Economics acting as a discussant (Location: Old Quad-G17, Cussonia Court Room 1). This session will continue from 13h30 to 15h00 and again from 17h30 to 19h00 that same day. Jaap Timmer will come back the next day, Thursday 3 December, as a discussant for three session on Intimacy & information: dilemmas of power, trust and property in the informant encounter convened by Carmen Cummings and Timothy Pilbrow at 11h00 t0 12h30, 13h30 to 15h00, and 15h30 to 17h00  (Location: Babel 106 Middle Theatre).

Alongside the session on Intimacy and Information, Christopher Houston, Irfan Ahmad, Banu Senay, and Joel Kahn will convene three sessions on New Perpectives on Muslim Moralities (location Old Quad-G17, Cussonia Court Room 1). Bio-legitimacy and mobilities 2.0: a challenge to human rights? will be convened by Macquarie University PhD graduates Casimir MacGregor and Sverre Molland (location: Old Arts-155, Theatre D).

At 15h30 to 17h00 on Friday 4 December, a plenary event on the role of anthropology in the media and in our communities. The convenors (Gerhard Hoffstaedter, Greg Downey, Tess Lea, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes) will discuss how anthropologists can bring their knowledge to bear in public debates. Greg Downey is an experienced and popular conference tweeter, so make sure you follow the hashtag #moralhorizons as well as Greg’s twitter feed during the conference: https://twitter.com/GregDowney1

Macquarie University staff presenting include Jaap Timmer, Eve Vincent, Deborah Van Heekeren, Christopher Houston, and Banu Senay.

Macquarie University postgraduate students who will be presenting include: Kenneth Finis, Robyn Gillot, Paul Keil, Lisa Siobhan Irving, Michaela Stockey-Bridge, Sarah Cameron, and Mariske Westendorp.

Macquarie University anthropology PhD graduates who will be presenting include Casimir MacGregor, Sverre Molland and Paul Mason. Yes, that’s me, I’ll be presenting my research on tuberculosis in Vietnam at 11h00 on Friday 4 December in a session called Managing Medical Uncertainty convened by Tarryn Phillips, John Taylor, and Celia McMichael, with Susanna Trnka as discussant (Old Arts-103, Theatre A). Please check out our Pozible crowdfunding campaign to learn more about recent projects on tuberculosis.

#moralhorizons tweeters to watch out for this week
Greg Downey: https://twitter.com/GregDowney1
Natalie Swann: https://twitter.com/nataliemswann
Elisabet Rasch: https://twitter.com/ELI_TWIT
Sverre Molland: https://twitter.com/SverreMolland
Paul Mason: https://twitter.com/sociocerebral
Sarah Cameron: https://twitter.com/sarahofsydney
Rebekahh Cupitt: https://twitter.com/rbkhkth
David Colón-Cabrera https://twitter.com/DavoWanKenobi
Lara McKenzie: https://twitter.com/lara_mckenzie
Carole McGranahan: https://twitter.com/CMcGranahan
Jared Commerer: https://twitter.com/jaredcommerer
John Gannon: https://twitter.com/GannjdGannon
Jocelyn Cleghorn: https://twitter.com/jocelyncleghorn
Katarina Gray-Sharp: https://twitter.com/TeachingConsult
Rosita Armitage: https://twitter.com/PakRosi
Brigitte Lewis: https://twitter.com/briglewis
Vanessa Bowden: https://twitter.com/vanessambowden
Traci Sudana: https://twitter.com/sudana_t
Polly Stanton: https://twitter.com/pollystanton
And also this public list: https://twitter.com/TeachingConsult/lists/anthropology

In a panel on Power, Partnerships and Participation, Elan Lazuardi presented her work with Outreach Workers in 3 cities in Java (Surakarta, Semarang, and Yogyakarta). The final day of the Australasian STI & HIV Congress was full of information-rich presentations and vibrant discussions in four parallel sessions on numerous themes ranging from ARV guidelines to Culture, Sex and Technology. Perhaps one of the hottest topics was Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) – a daily pill that HIV negative people can take to prevent HIV infection. PrEP has taken the world by storm and could revolutionise our approach to HIV prevention (yet to be approved for use in Australia).

The Joint World STI & HIV Congress and Australasian HIV & AIDS Conference has been trending widely on twitter (#AUSHIVAIDS2015 & #worldSTI2015), blogs, and facebook this week. Here are some links to the blog posts and articles arising from the conference that have been trending this week:

• AIDS cases stable, other STIs on the rise
• Approaches to HIV and aging
• ART Guidelines Discussion
• ART Perspectives- Symposium- Who’s life is it anyway?
• Benefits of self collected samples for cervical screening
• Congratulations Cuba!
• Criminal endangerment offences are an obstacle to the HIV response
• Excessive Intellectual Property Protection for HIV Treatments
• Find Me, Treat me, PrEP me, Heal me Panel Discussion
• Genital inflammation and HIV transmission
• The Global Elimination of Hep C
• HCV – a 25-year (r)evolution
• HCV – Treatment As Prevention
• HIV Co-infections, hepatitis B, hepatitis C and TB
• HIV and Co-Morbidity
• HIV and cardiovascular disease
• HIV and syphilis: a syndemic with no end in sight?
• HIV and Women’s Health
• Indian blood: Two Spirit return, Mixed Race Identity and Critical Interventions in HIV
• Late breakers
• Law reform to reduce HIV transmission
• Legal and human rights, stigma and discrimination
• The Mega Model!
• Methamphetamine and HIV
• Negotiating Change
• NSW HIV strategy and HIV treatment cascade
• Peer Advocacy network for the Sexual Health
• Penelope Lowe Trainee Breakfast
• PrEP in Focus
• Notes from a PrEP user
• Qld to develop first sexual health strategy
• $5 million plan to tackle Queensland’s sexual health
• Should we be treating anal cancer precursors?
• Social and Behavioural Research
• STI / HIV and Pregnancy
• STIs continue to climb according to rise
• Study Claims Internet Is Most Common Source of Sexuality Education of LGBTQI Youth
• The Good and the Bad of HCV
• Time to change to TAF based regimens
• Toxicities
• Update on vaccines
• Transgender is not a gender identity
• Treatment to prevent HIV – Does timing matter?
• Treatment to Prevent HIV: Opening Plenary HIV&AIDS 2015
• QuAC launch of PrEP programme
• Research into a HIV cure

Active bloggers have included (in no particular order & not an exhaustive list):

• Janelle Small
• Crystal Connelly
• Pauline Cundill
• Mel Kelly
• Vanessa Towell
• Ivette Aguirre
• Peggy Bain
• Jeffrey McMullen
• Joanne Leamy
• Gwamaka Mwasakifwa

Posters

Poster sessions continued throughout the week, providing an exciting space for discussion and exchange. Khine Soe Lin from the University of Melbourne received the Runner Up Poster Presentation Award for his poster, “Identities in Motion: Cyberspace and Myanmar Men having Sex with Men“. Poster listings can be located here.

For summaries of previous days, please visit: