No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

The conceptual and practical work done by social medicine and global health have often overlapped. In this paper, we argue that new efforts to apprehend 'the social' in social medicine offer important insights to global health along five lines of critical analysis: (1) reconfigurations of the state and new forms of political activism, (2) philanthrocapitalism and the economisation of life, (3) The economy of attention, (4) anthropogenic climate change, and (5) the geopolitics of North and South.

The quasi-totality of social scientists who studied screening for cervical tumours identified such screening with a single method: the Pap smear (exfoliative cytology). This article explains that this method was not valid everywhere. The history of screening for cervical cancer in Brazil displays an alternative method for detecting cervical malignancies: a direct observation of the cervix with a specific instrument--the colposcope. The development of this method in Brazil in the 1940s and 1950s reflected a complex mixture of professional interests, government policies, and regional, local and charitable initiatives. While the use of colposcopy for cervical tumour screening was phased out in the 1970s and 1980s, the long lifespan and widespread diffusion of this method illuminates the irreducible contingency of specific developments in science, technology and medicine. Seen from the vantage point of Brazil, the Western model for preventing cervical malignancies no longer appears self-evident Alternative choices might have led to the development of different material and visual cultures of medicine, stimulated different patterns of medical specialization and division of medical labour, produced different links between malignancies, women, gynaecologists, epidemiologists and public health experts, and shaped different health policies.

The claim that anti-malaria drugs, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, can cure COVID-19 became a focus of fierce political battles that pitted promoters of these pharmaceuticals, Presidents Bolsonaro and Trump among them, against "medical elites." At the center of these battles are different meanings of effectiveness in medicine, the complex role of randomized clinical trials (RCTs) in proving such effectiveness, the task of medical experts and the state in regulating pharmaceuticals, patients' activism, and the collective production of medical knowledge. This article follows the trajectory of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as anti-COVID-19 drugs, focusing on the reception of views of their main scientific promoter, the French infectious disease specialist, Didier Raoult. The surprising career of these drugs, our text proposes, is fundamentally a political event, not in the narrow sense of engaging specific political fractions, but in the much broader sense of the politics of public participation in science. [COVID-19, chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine, randomized clinical trials, AIDS activism]

Since the first recorded case of COVID-19 on February 26, 2020, Brazil has seen an exponential growth in the number of cases and deaths. The national testing approach has been insufficient to correctly use this tool in the support of containing the epidemic in the country. In this communication, we discuss efforts and challenges to scale-up COVID-19 testing at the Brazilian Unified National Health System (SUS). This communication presents the initial results of the research project created to investigate the political, industrial, technological, and regulatory aspects that may affect the diagnostic and testing capacity for COVID-19 in Brazil. The paper draws on the review of academic literature, media publication, and collection of public data on tests purchase and regulation. It enlists initiatives to enhance PCR testing, national production and development of technologies, as well as regulatory measures to fast-track new tests. Our analysis indicates some points of reflection. Firstly, the lack of a consistent national strategy to fight COVID-19 exarcebated supply problems of diagnostic components. If the country was eventually able to circumvent this situation, it still faces a more structural dependency on the importation of diagnostic components. Secondly, the discontinued funding and distribution of tests may have implied health policy fragmentation and the growing importance of local governments and non-state actors to fighting the epidemics within SUS. Finally, initiatives established since the second semester of 2020 have expanded the testing capacity at SUS. However, it has not been sufficient to control the progress of the epidemic in the country.

No abstract