Bug chasing, the practice of pursuing HIV positive sexual partners in order to acquire HIV, presents multiple dilemmas for health affiliates in terms of how to address discourses and practices that challenge widely held beliefs about health and medicine. In order to examine how researchers respond to controversial counterpublic rhetorics, this essay chronicles the construction of "bug chasing" in published social science literature. Guided by a theory of containment rhetoric, I analyze how bug chasers are configured in the language of social science used to describe and explain them. I find that social scientific coverage of bug chasing often addresses the behavior using a recipe of rhetorical containment: first, authors gaze upon bug chasers via distanced descriptions of the community; second, authors characterize the behavior as exhibiting an idealistic naiveté; and, third, authors stress the inconceivable, and therefore reproachable, sacrifice that bug chasing ultimately demands of its onlookers and participants. In closing, I evaluate the consequences of this containment rhetoric and offer three rhetorical maneuvers to aid future scholarship that examines the discourses and communities that counter dominant health ideologies.
Despite the fact that both men and women carry the human papillomavirus (HPV) and jointly contribute to its status as an epidemic, the promotion of Gardasil, a vaccine that blocks infection from four strains of HPV, has largely been designated as a women's-only health issue. The following case study contributes to ongoing efforts in the field of health communication to identify problematic assumptions informing contemporary health policy and practices. Specifically, I analyze how Merck Pharmaceuticals, the creator of Gardasil, strategically imbues direct-to-consumer advertisements with contradiction to preserve traditional notions of both women and medicine. I found that three gendered dialectics characterize Merck's efforts to invoke complacency among female consumers: public/secret, education/ignorance, and structured/individualist. In the case of the HPV vaccination, the implications of these dialectics are the perpetuation of complacency among female audiences that threatens both the success of this particular technology and the overall status of women and health. In line with conclusions offered by Thompson (2010a), this study extends a call for health and communication scholars to continue to deconstruct dominant medical discourses and presents possibilities for re-storying narratives that mediate women's experiences with health.
Public health, a widely encompassing term often used to describe ways that various stakeholders communicate about and respond to issues of health that effect large populations, tends to be centered on concerns about prevention, containment, empowerment, and advocacy in relation to disease. As a distinct professional field and set of practices, public health is sometimes described and categorized as the branch of healthcare primarily concerned with populations, whereas medicine focuses more on individual health (Public Health, 2019). The American Public Health Association specifies that "while a doctor treats people who are sick, those of us working in public health try to prevent people from getting sick or injured in the first place. We also promote wellness by encouraging healthy behaviors" (para. 2, 2018). In addition, scholars and practitioners in public health track and analyze emergent health patterns, react in times of crises, and provide important insights into the effectiveness of policies, procedures, and responses. Strategies used by public health professionals to "prevent" and "promote" across a variety of health issues and situations often are rhetorical in nature; that is, they center on persuasive strategies and messages intended to move people from words to action. In his state-of-the-art review of health communication inquiry and health promotion, Gary Kreps (2015) notes that "Communication scholarship has made major contributions to promoting public health over the last 50 years" (p. 4). Despite the wide array of interdisciplinary experts equipped to study persuasive communication,
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.