The global push for health statistics and electronic digital health information systems is about more than tracking health incidence and prevalence. It is also experienced on the ground as means to develop and maintain particular norms of health business, knowledge, and decision- and profit-making that are not innocent. Statistics make possible audit and accountability logics that undergird the management of health at a distance and that are increasingly necessary to the business of health. Health statistics are inextricable from their social milieus, yet as business artifacts they operate as if they are freely formed, objectively originated, and accurate. This article explicates health statistics as cultural forms and shows how they have been produced and performed in two very different countries: Sierra Leone and Germany. In both familiar and surprising ways, this article shows how statistics and their pursuit organize and discipline human behavior, constitute subject positions, and reify existing relations of power.
In the global food system, food is considered a disposable commodity and waste is produced at extraordinarily high levels. In a number of affluent nations, including Canada, "dumpster diving" for food has emerged as an approach to food provisioning. This article is based on a research project conducted for an honors thesis that examines dumpster diving for food in Vancouver, British Columbia. While an earlier report (Miewald 2009) identified dumpster diving in Vancouver as a survival strategy for people living in poverty who experience food insecurity, research for this article reveals that motivations also extend beyond economic desperation. The data contest some common assumptions and provide explanations of people's motivations and their means of "dumpstering" in the Vancouver locale. As such, the article reveals divers' broader political, social, and economic motivations in a specific locale, enabling an exploration of some systemic contradictions of food production, distribution, provisioning, and consumption.This article explains Dumpster TM1 diving for food in Vancouver, British Columbia, and why people do it. Diving has emerged as a food provisioning practice occurring in affluent urban centers, including Canada. 2 People who provision food from dumpsters-dumpster "divers"-have transformed their own behaviors-their foodways-to take advantage of an opportunity that our global food system creates: massive levels of food waste, some of which ends up in waste receptacles referred to in North America as dumpsters.We wish to thank the dumpster divers and everyone else who shared their views, experiences, stories, and food with us.
Evidence from Sierra Leone reveals the significant limitations of big data in disease detection and containment efforts. Early in the 2014–2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, media heralded HealthMap's ability to detect the outbreak from newsfeeds. Later, big data—specifically, call detail record data collected from millions of cell phones—was hyped as useful for stopping the disease by tracking contagious people. It did not work. In this article, I trace the causes of big data's containment failures. During epidemics, big data experiments can have opportunity costs: namely, forestalling urgent response. Finally, what counts as data during epidemics must include that coming from anthropological technologies because they are so useful for detection and containment.
This research study shows how race becomes ascribed through nursing theory and day-to-day workplace socialization processes. We show how public health nurses supporting and promoting breastfeeding for new mothers learn about and reproduce racialized stereotypes, which shape the care they provide. Even when nurses attempt to actively resist racialized stereotypes, most participate in essentialized nursing practice by using racialized institutional practices. Nursing theory needs to expand to help the nurse navigate and understand both the nurses' and client's local histories as well as individual-to-systems level constraints and supports that may impede, or promote, a mother's ability to breastfeed.
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