Epidemiology and Culture-James A. Trostle

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Epidemiology and Culture
This book shows how practitioners in the emerging eld of cultural
epidemiology describe human health, communicate with diverse au-
diences, and intervene to improve health and prevent disease. It uses
textual and statistical portraits of disease to describe past and present
collaborations between anthropology and epidemiology. Interpreting
epidemiology as a cultural practice helps to reveal the ways in which
measurement, causal thinking, and intervention design are all inu-
enced by belief, habit, and theories of power. By unpacking many
common disease risks and epidemiologic categories, this book reveals
unexamined assumptions and shows how sociocultural context inu-
ences measurement of disease. Examples include studies of epilepsy,
cholera, mortality on the Titanic, breastfeeding, and adolescent smok-
ing. The book describes methods as varied as observing individuals,
measuring social networks, and compiling data from death certicates.
It argues that effective public health interventions must work more often
and better at the level of entire communities.
a :c s a . 1 nos 1 L c is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Di-
rector of Urban Initiatives at Trinity College, Hartford. He has worked
in more than 20 countries during his career in international health, and
he has been invited to lecture in many others. He has co-authored, in
Spanish, De la Investigaci on en Salud a la Poltica: La Difcil Traducci on
(From Health Research to Policy: The Difcult Translation). He has pub-
lished in Health, Policy and Planning; Neurology; The Annual Review
of Anthropology; Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry; Medical Anthropology
Quarterly; and, most frequently, in Social Science and Medicine. Professor
Trostle has been a Temporary Advisor to the World Health Organiza-
tion, and currently he sits on a WHO Task Force on Research to Policy
as well as on the WHO Human Reproduction Programme Regional
Advisory Panel for the Americas.
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Cambridge Studies in Medical Anthropology
Editor
ALaN Hanwoob University of Massachusetts, Boston
Editorial Board
WiLLia: DncssLcn University of Alabama
RoNaLb FnaNkcNncnc Brunel University, UK
Manv Jo Goob Harvard University
SnanoN Kacr:aN University of California, San Francisco
SninLcv LiNbcNnac: City University of New York
Mancanc1 Lock McGill University
Ca1ncniNc PaN1cn-Bnick University of Durham, UK
Medical Anthropology is the fastest-growing specialist area within anthropology,
both in North America and in Europe. Beginning as an applied eld serving
public health specialists, medical anthropology now provides a signicant forum
for many of the most urgent debates in anthropology and the humanities. It
includes the study of medical institutions and health care in a variety of rich and
poor societies, the investigation of the cultural construction of illness, and the
analysis of ideas about the body, birth, maturity, ageing, and death.
This series includes theoretically innovative monographs, state-of-the-art col-
lections of essays on current issues, and short books introducing main themes in
the subdiscipline.
1. Lynn M. Morgan, Community Participation in Health: The Politics of Primary
Care in Costa Rica
2. Thomas J. Csordas (ed.), Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground
of Culture and Health
3. Paul Brodwin, Medicine and Morality in Haiti: The Contest for Healing Power
4. Susan Reynolds Whyte, Questioning Misfortune: The Pragmatics of Uncer-
tainty in Eastern Uganda
5. Margaret Lock and Patricia Kaufert, Pragmatic Women and Body Politics
6. Vincanne Adams, Doctors for Democracy
7. Elizabeth Hsu, The Transmission of Chinese Medicine
8. Margaret Lock, Allan Young, and Alberto Cambrosio (eds.), Living and
Working with the New Medical Technologies: Intersection of Inquiry
9. Daniel Moerman, Meaning, Medicine, and the Placebo Effect
10. Susan Reynolds Whyte, Sjaak van der Geest, and Anita Hardon, Social Lives
of Medicine
11. Janis H. Jenkins and Robert J. Barrett, Schizophrenia, Culture, and
Subjectivity: The Edge of Experience
12. Andrea Wiley, An Ecology of High-Altitude Infancy: A Biocultural Perspective
13. James A. Trostle, Epidemiology and Culture
iii
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iv
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James A. Trostle
Trinity College, Hartford
v
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Cambridge University Press
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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
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Contents
List of Figures and Tables page ix
Foreword by S. Leonard Syme xi
Acknowledgments xv
1 Introduction 1
I. Patterns of Disease and Patterns of Culture 1
II. Epidemiology and Medical Anthropology 3
III. Applying an Integrated Cultural-Epidemiological
Approach 8
For Further Reading 20
2 The Origins of an Integrated Approach in Anthropology
and Epidemiology 21
I. Scientic Attention to the Social Environment in the
Nineteenth Century 22
II. Epidemiology and Medical Anthropology in
Collaboration 26
III. Continuity and Change in Twenty-First-Century
Projects Integrating Anthropology and Epidemiology 38
3 Disease Patterns and Assumptions: Unpacking Variables 42
I. The Origins and Meanings of Disease-Pattern
Categories 42
II. Assumptions about Dening and Measuring Variables 47
III. Aspects of the Category Person 48
IV. Aspects of Place 63
V. Aspects of Time 68
VI. Conclusion 72
4 Cultural Issues in Measurement and Bias 74
I. Introduction 74
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viii Contents
II. Bias in Epidemiology and Its Anthropological
Counterparts 79
III. Data Collection as Social Exchange 85
IV. Data Collection and the Challenges of Human
Attention 91
V. Social and Cultural Aspects of Clinical Trials as a
Form of Data Collection 93
5 Anthropological Contributions to the Study of Cholera 96
I. The Pervasiveness of Diarrhea: Implications for
Epidemiology 98
II. Cholera: The So-Called Natural History of a
Diarrheal Disease 100
III. Cholera in Latin America: A Sociocultural History
of Disease 103
IV. Conclusion: Is Cholera a Signpost? 119
6 Anthropological and Epidemiological Collaboration to
Help Communities Become Healthier 122
I. Introduction 122
II. The Community in Public Health Interventions 135
III. Anthropological Participation in Population
Interventions 139
IV. The Tools of Intervention Research: An
Anthropological Analysis of Randomized Controlled
Trials 142
V. Conclusion 148
7 Perceiving and Representing Risk 150
I. Popular and Professional Ideas about Risk 150
II. Communicating about Risk, Menace, and Safety 161
III. A Few Lessons and Opportunities 166
8 Conclusion 168
I. Epidemiology, Proof and Judgment 170
II. Conclusions about Dening Disciplines: Defended
Border versus Semi-permeable Membrane 172
References 175
Index 199
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Figures and Tables
Figures
1.1 Comparison of percentages of subjects in three samples
(clinic, mixed community and clinic, and pure
community) with scores in four regions of elevation on a
Psychosocial Functioning Scale of the Washington
Psychosocial Seizure Inventory page 16
3.1 Distribution (shaded) of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in the
Americas in 1970, at the end of the mosquito eradication
program, and in 1997 64
4.1 Public opinion poll in Shoe comic strip 75
4.2 Monthly prevalence estimates of illness in the community
and the roles of physicians, hospitals, and university
medical centers in the provision of medical care (adults 16
years of age and over) 80
4.3 Results of a reanalysis of the monthly prevalence of illness
in the community and the roles of various sources of
health care 81
5.1 The natural history of disease 101
5.2 Cholera threatens New York City 104
5.3 A sociocultural history of disease 105
7.1 Medical news cartoon 151
7.2 Distribution of childhood leukemia cases in Woburn,
Massachusetts 154
Tables
3.1 Mortality by economic status and sex 49
3.2 Mortality by economic status and age 49
3.3 Survival percentages separated by characteristics 50
3.4 Observed survival percentages by variable 50
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x Figures and Tables
3.5 Social variables included in death certicates from four
countries 53
3.6 Recognition of malarial threat by season in Tanzania 69
4.1 Comparison: Knowledge/Attitude/Practice (KAP) Survey
versus 24-hour recall versus observation among 247
families in Bangladesh 86
4.2 Circumcision status reported by patient and physician 92
5.1 Mechanisms of transmission of epidemic cholera in Latin
America, as determined in eight epidemiologic
investigations, 19911993 110
5.2 Cumulative case fatality rates (%) for countries with more
than 10,000 accumulated cholera cases, January 1, 1991,
to July 15, 1995 112
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Foreword
I have been waiting to read this book for 20 years. In 1983, I had a stu-
dent in one of my classes at Berkeley, a young man named Jim Trostle,
who challenged almost everything I said. Trostle was at the time a doc-
toral student in the Medical Anthropology program at Berkeley (a joint
program with the Medical School in San Francisco), and he had taken
off a year to get a Masters of Public Health degree. I was a Professor
of Social Epidemiology in the School of Public Health, and my research
and teaching involved the study of psychosocial factors as they inuenced
the causation of disease. Trostle argued that I was not paying enough at-
tention to the concept of culture and that my research would suffer as
a result. He said that epidemiologists and anthropologists had to nd a
way to work together so that both could be more effective contributors
to human welfare.
I thought he might be right, but it was too difcult an idea to take
seriously. Epidemiologists use quantitative methods in studies of large
populations, whereas anthropologists do qualitative, ethnographic studies
in remote Pacic islands. We read different books, we use a different
language, and we have very different intellectual histories and traditions.
Nevertheless, here was Trostle in my class, learning the new language
and trying to nd a way to bridge the gap between us. I didnt know if he
could accomplish this difcult feat, but I was betting against it.
Since that time, we epidemiologists have suffered a whole series of
very embarrassing failures. We had been doing our research attempting
to identify disease risk factors. That is what epidemiologists do. But the
reason for this type of research is to help people lower their rate of disease.
Our model is to identify the risk factors and share that information with
a waiting public so that they will then rush home and, in the interests
of good health, change their behaviors to lower their risk. It is a reason-
able model, but it hasnt worked. In intervention study after intervention
study, people have been informed about the things they need to do, and
they have failed to follow our advice.
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xii Foreword
For example, inCalifornia, the State Health Department has for the last
15 years made it a major priority to inform people about the importance
of eating ve fruits and vegetables a day. Over the course of these 15 years,
surveys of representative samples of the population have clearly shown
that people understand the message. These same surveys, however, also
show no change at all in eating behavior. There has been no increase in
the frequency of fruits and vegetables in diets. The only thing that has
increased during this time is obesity.
I myself have devoted enormous amounts of time and energy in the
design and conduct of superb intervention studies. These studies were
brilliant in conception, and they were implemented as well as any studies
could be. All failed to produce their intended result. After many years of
brooding, I have nally come to an opinion about one reason for this: We
in public health have important messages to give to people, but people
have lives to lead. There often is a major gap between these two priorities.
This is an issue that anthropologists think about, and it would be good
to incorporate that thinking into the design of better interventions.
I have come to another conclusion: I decided that Trostle had been
right all along, and I hoped that one day he would write a book about the
issue. This book comes none too soon. We all know that our medical care
system is at a very strained point. The baby boomer population in the
United States will enter the over-65-year-old group very soon (between
2020 and 2030), and when they do, the number of old people in the
United States population will have doubled. If we think the medical care
system is in difculty now, we aint seen nothin yet. We must learn how
to prevent disease in the rst place and not simply wait until people are
already sick. To develop effective interventions, epidemiology must learn
howto understand the concept of culture, and epidemiologists must learn
how to work with anthropologists as partners. And anthropologists must
learn to work with epidemiologists as partners. This book goes a long
way toward making this a realistic possibility.
In addition to the crucial issues discussed in this important book, at-
tention must be given to the way in which both anthropologists and epi-
demiologists dene such issues as health and illness and suffering. As
long as the focus of our work is limited to specic diseases (asthma,
coronary heart disease) and disease-specic risk factors (obesity, choles-
terol), our research will always be removed from many of the things that
people care about in their everyday lives, such as their jobs, children,
debts, family, and happiness. It is important that both anthropologists
and epidemiologists nd ways to focus their research on these funda-
mental determinants of disease susceptibility.
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Foreword xiii
For example, we are now doing an intervention among fth graders
living in a low-income community in California. The grant we received
to do this work was intended to inuence smoking and other drug use
among these children as well as violence and school performance. But
we are in fact intervening on the culture of hope. If these children believe
they will be dead by the age of 20, it really does not matter much if they
smoke or do badly in school. Hope, on the other hand, is something
they care about, and if we are successful, the results might inuence
smoking, drugs, school behavior, and many other health-related issues.
In another study, we are observing a large group of bus drivers who
have high rates of hypertension, back trouble, gastrointestinal complaints,
respiratory difculties, and alcohol problems. We could (and should) deal
with each problem, but we also must learn to focus on the fundamental
and underlying determinant of all of these problems: the culture of the
job itself. This is an issue that the drivers care about deeply.
The effort to identify fundamental problems that people care about
and that also inuence rates of health and illness is one that requires a
partnership between anthropologists and epidemiologists. If these two
groups could nd a way to collaborate, we hopefully could design more
effective and meaningful interventions.
This book lays out the principles necessary to help this process along.
It is a courageous and visionary book. It has taken me many years to
understand the wisdom of Jim Trostles views, and I am pleased that now
a whole group of new people all over the world will be exposed to them.
S. Leonard Syme, Professor Emeritus
University of California, Berkeley
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Acknowledgments
In 1978 an anthropology professor at Columbia University, Ida Susser,
told me that she was enrolled in a postdoctoral training program in psy-
chiatric epidemiology at Columbias medical school. As a naive under-
graduate I thought it alarming and wonderful that one could study
a eld that contained so many syllables. My anthropological training at
Columbia under Lambros Comitas, Alexander Alland, Charles Harring-
ton, Marvin Harris, Leith Mullings, Joan Vincent, Ida Susser, and George
Bond enabled me to build larger pictures out of the ne-grained details of
individual observations and interviews. Anthropology provided ways to
understand the variability, context, and rationales for health-related prac-
tices. I hoped epidemiology would give me theories and tools to under-
stand the frequency and correlates of such practices. As I learned more, I
found epidemiology to be a powerful strategy for describing health-related
social problems at scale, summarizing multiple disease occurrences into
patterns and ows, and looking for broad causes without descending into
individual accounts.
I took up a series of paid internships, summer jobs, and, eventually,
fulltime employment at the Sergievsky Center, an epidemiological re-
search institute at Columbias College of Physicians and Surgeons. Al
Hauser and Mervyn Susser gave me good training and real responsibili-
ties, and I will be forever grateful to both of them. At Sergievsky, Gerry
Oppenheimer, Richard Neugebauer, and Ruth Ottman encouraged and
answered my naive questions. Len Syme at University of California,
Berkeley, and Fred Dunn at University of California, San Francisco, were
my primary mentors during my doctoral training. I could not have done
better than to nd them both. And Al Hauser, Len Kurland, and Frank
Sharbrough helped my doctoral research nd its way through the Mayo
Clinic bureaucracy, seven committees deep.
As I continued to mix anthropological and epidemiological methods
I became passionate about nding others who had explored these dis-
ciplines before me. During library work and interviews in Los Angeles,
Jerusalem, Chapel Hill, New York City, and Berkeley, I met such folks as
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xvi Acknowledgments
Sidney and Emily Kark, Eva and Harry Phillips, Jack Geiger, Art Rubel,
and Shirley Lindenbaum, who were gracious in sharing their time, mem-
ories, and many published and unpublished books and papers.
In 1988 I moved to the Harvard Institute for International Develop-
ment, where many of my ideas about interdisciplinary exchanges were
tested and revised during seven years of work in 10 countries. I am grate-
ful to Richard Cash, Heidi Clyne, Fitzroy Henry, Bradley Nixon, Jon
Simon, and Laura Tesler for providing a stimulating and supportive en-
vironment in which to confront new ideas and try to come up with cre-
ative solutions to unexpected problems. Johannes Sommerfeld was my
intellectual colleague in the social sciences at the Institute. I continue to
appreciate and benet from his persistent enthusiasm for the topic.
In the early 1990s I started sharing my ideas about anthropology
and epidemiology with Spanish-language audiences in Latin America.
This was made possible primarily through teaching in the International
Course on Applied Epidemiology run by Mexicos Ministry of Health
and through classes I gave at the Center for the Study of State and So-
ciety in Buenos Aires, Argentina; the National Institute of Public Health
in Cuernavaca, Mexico; and the Universidad Austral in Valdivia, Chile.
I am grateful to these institutions for creating opportunities for me to
develop and disseminate many of the ideas expressed here. Mario Bronf-
man has been a colleague and friend for most of my professional career,
and he was instrumental in helping me develop and teach the ideas writ-
ten in this book through an appointment at Mexicos National Institute
of Public Health. Ana Langer, Carlos Coimbra, Jr., Edmundo Granda,
Roberto Tapia, Hernan Manzelli, Monica Gogna, Silvina Ramos, and
Mariana Romero helped me generously despite their busy schedules.
Steve Gehlbach and Harris Pastides at the School of Public Health of
the University of Massachusetts and Richard Cash at the School of Pub-
lic Health at Harvard also helped me learn how to teach this material.
Trinity College, through a sabbatical leave and faculty research grant,
gave me almost all the time I needed to nish this book.
A number of students have given me research and editorial assis-
tance on this project over the years, including Dorothy Francoeur,
Jessica LaPointe, Cynthia Lopez, Andrew Noymer, Brian Page, Camvan
Phu, and Elisabeth Woodhams. Librarians at Mount Holyoke Col-
lege; Trinity College; the Watkinson Library; University of California,
Berkeley, School of Public Health; and the Epidemiology Division of
Mexicos Ministry of Health all helped nd references. Friends and col-
leagues Beth Conklin, Kitty Corbett, Joe Eisenberg, Mitch Feldman,
Craig Janes, Jane Kramer, Lois McCloskey, Steven Katz, Dan Perlman,
and Frank Zimmerman helped me to think more synthetically about
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Acknowledgments xvii
interdisciplinary work and modeled it themselves. Fernando Barros, Jim
Carey, Robert Hahn, and Paul Slovic graciously provided important data
and references, and Jennifer Fichera and Luiselle Rivera gave secretarial
assistance at critical moments.
Those who read and commented on chapter drafts also made wel-
come contributions to this work, including Charles Briggs, Mario Bronf-
man, Peter Guarnaccia, Don Joralemon, Abby Marean, Meredith Miller,
Gerry Oppenheimer, Mariana Romero, Jay Schensul, Jeremy Sussman,
and Lissy Woodhams, as well as anonymous reviewers. Jessica Kuper
originally asked me to write this book, but I owe my largest debt to Alan
Harwood, master editor and extraordinarily patient advisor.
Many of the ideas in this book have been traveling with me for a long
time. Portions of Chapter 2 are drawn from Trostle (1986a and 1986b)
and from Trostle and Sommerfeld (1996). Parts of Chapter 3 were rst
presented in 1997 at an International Symposium on the Role of Medi-
cal Anthropology in Infectious Disease Control at Heidelberg University
and in 1999 at the American Anthropological Association annual meet-
ing. Early drafts of Chapter 4 were presented at the Department of Social
Medicine at Harvard University in 1990 and at the annual meeting of the
American Anthropological Association in 1993. Early versions of Chap-
ter 5 were presented at the 1995 and 1998 meetings of the American
Anthropological Association and at the London School of Hygiene and
Tropical Medicine in 1999. Portions of Chapter 7 were presented at the
joint meeting of the Society for Medical Anthropology and the Society
for Applied Anthropology in 2000, the Sixth Latin American Congress
of Social Science and Medicine in Peru in 2001, and the CIEPP/COTES
meeting in Bolivia in 2001. I am grateful to the audiences at all these
venues for their questions and suggestions.
I now fully understand why so many authors dedicate books to their
families. My parents, John and Sue Trostle, always encouraged me to be
curious and to question boundaries. Noah and Juliana graciously gave up
their dad to this book for more time than any of us wanted. And my wife,
Lynn Morgan, continues to be my rst and last reader. This book is for
them.
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1 Introduction
I used to work on the 19th oor of a building overlooking the Hudson
River in upper Manhattan. I was often fascinated by the ever-shifting
trafc patterns down below on the busy six-lane Henry Hudson Parkway.
A rush-hour accident could bring three lanes of trafc to a halt when a
knot of cars backed up behind police cars and ambulances. Unobstructed
trafc going the other way would soon jamup, too, as drivers slowed their
vehicles and craned their necks to see what had happened. The delays
took longer to clear than to form, sometimes persisting an hour or more
after an accident had been removed.
This memory of my trafc-observing days came back to me when I
thought about how to explain the difference between a group of individ-
uals and a population. I remembered drivers in their vehicles down
below, each making decisions about how fast and how close to follow
the car in front, looking for a quick exit and trying to catch a glimpse
of torn metal or bodies. The sum of the eagerness, frustration, and cu-
riosity of this group of commuters was more than a series of momentary
glances or ashes of brake lights. Individual drivers thoughts and acts,
added together over time, turned into trafc delays that themselves created
additional glances and brake lights and sometimes even new accidents.
Individual cars passed through, but their movement created trafc pat-
terns that endured. Drivers and trafc followed related but different rules,
and neither was reducible to the other.
I. Patterns of Disease and Patterns of Culture
Human reactions to disease also create patterns. Imagine a Peruvian
sherman who ate contaminated shellsh in January 1991, contracted
cholera, and died. Individuals in his town gathered to wash the body
and to mourn the deceased. They drank and ate together, nding com-
panionship. But some of the participants were exposed to cholera in the
shared water. Their travels after the funeral changed the likelihood of
exposure for many others, and the number of people they saw and the
1
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2 Introduction
activities they undertook further inuenced the spread of the disease. In
April 1991, cholera broke out in mountain villages when recently infected
but still asymptomatic workers from the coast traveled home to celebrate
Easter. Their behavior as a group created patterns that could not be de-
duced from the sum of their individual actions. Individual decisions and
epidemic patterns are partly separable but clearly linked.
Closely related to the kinds of individual decisions and behavioral pat-
terns we have been talking about, culture also inuences human health
and the patterning of disease. Our total way of life (work, food, activities),
combined with our learned behavior (including knowledge, lies, and mis-
understandings), our techniques for adjusting to the environment, and
our ways of feeling and believing all inuence our susceptibility to ill-
ness. Some argue that they become written into our genes, and they cer-
tainly become written into our bone structure and musculature. Migrant
farm workers, for example, have different diseases than coal miners, and
Central American men who wield machetes all day for their whole lives
often develop one arm longer than the other.
Bodies and pathogens are determined not just by physical actions but
by beliefs about what is important. Beliefs are powerful motivators. The
disproportionate mortality among infant girls in some South Asian na-
tions is partly an outcome of cultural preferences for sons over daughters
(Sen 1992). In cultures where injections are thought to be stronger than
pills, a town might have several specialized injectionists on call to ad-
minister to the sick (Reeler 2000). And diagnostic preferences among
physicians in different countries are responsible for some of the national
differences in rates of depression, low blood pressure, and infant mortal-
ity (Payer 1988). Rates of morbidity (sickness) and mortality (death) are
determined in part by cultural scripts that specify how, where, and when
to behave in certain ways.
The inuence of culture can be seen in how people care for symp-
toms before they receive a diagnosis. Groups vary in their willingness
to undertake preventive measures; they vary in how they perceive and
classify symptoms. Across the world, people employ diverse markers to
decide who will be labeled disease-ridden or contagious; they differen-
tially rank which diseases are seen as important or unimportant. What
treatment, if any, sick people choose, whether they take medication, how
they manipulate their diseases for other ends, whether therapy succeeds
culture inuences diseases through these pathways as well as through the
patterned work of nerves, muscles, and bones. Whether one thinks of
body disorder as inuenced by Chinese energy meridians, Tibetan pulses,
Latin American hot/cold states, or immune system function is largely a
product of where one is and with whom one interacts. Available healing
traditions range fromthe grand and ancient ones of Chinese acupuncture
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Epidemiology and Medical Anthropology 3
or Greek humoral pathology of blood and bile to more recent precepts of
homeopathy or chiropractic in North America. Biomedicine is one par-
ticularly widespread form of therapy in the world today, which bases its
treatments on a combination of empirical tests and custom. It is a cul-
tural system like the others, often competing with them, less frequently
collaborating.
Yet cultural meanings are also local and contested. This aspect of cul-
ture highlights its dynamic, changing quality and gives weight to forces
of change and interaction. From this perspective, culture is constantly
being transformed. People within groups may be aware of group norms,
but those norms themselves change over time, and people choose to re-
ject the norms or manipulate their behavior within them. For example,
human beauty standards, and their health-related consequences, change
dramatically over time. The corset allowed one set of health problems
(muscle atrophy, liver damage) to emerge, whereas a century later breast
augmentation caused others (pain, scar tissue, implant rupture). Food
preferences, time pressure, and large-scale industrial meal production
combine to create a new epidemic of obesity based on fast food and
sedentism.
Cultural categories not only change through time, but they also can be
differentially manipulated by people interacting within a web of relation-
ships embedded in a larger material and social context. In that context,
individuals pick and choose different aspects of culture to form their
own identities; they manipulate cultural symbols, transform them, and
combine them in unexpected ways that can protect health or promote
disease. Statements about culture, whether made by local natives or
well-intentioned outsiders, need to be evaluated not only in terms of
their content but also in terms of the purposes of those who assert them.
This book describes the connections between patterns of disease and
patterns of culture to highlight the creative interdisciplinary ways by
which researchers are confronting todays vexing and complex health
challenges. By creating conversations across disciplines, students and
practicing professionals are better able to collaborate across disciplines,
design successful health interventions, and communicate more broadly
and clearly with both professional and popular audiences (Dunn 1979).
These processes will help develop more appropriate health policies,
deepen understandings of disease causation and treatment, and create
more effective actions to enhance health and prevent disease.
II. Epidemiology and Medical Anthropology
Both epidemiology and medical anthropology are scientic disciplines
that search for patterns of disease and behavior. They both have humanity
P1: Kad
4 Introduction
at their core. The disciplines are separated by history and tradition
epidemiology tends to be statistical and quantitative, anthropology tex-
tual and qualitative, but this book brings them together. My vision of an
integrated and interdisciplinary dialogue has been created, and is shared,
by many like-minded anthropologists and epidemiologists who appreci-
ate the value of collaborating on a common project. (See, for example,
Fleck and Ianni 1958, Dunn and Janes 1986, Frankel et al. 1991, Hahn
1995, Inhorn 1995, and Dressler et al. 1997.)
Epidemiology is derived from the Greek epi meaning upon, demos
meaning the populace or common people, and logos meaning word.
Epidemiology is literally the study of what is upon the populace, refer-
ring specically to the burden of disease. Because epidemics were once
the most obviously burdensome of diseases, the two words overlap. But
epidemiology is more than the study of epidemics. It is more convention-
ally dened as the study of the distribution and determinants of disease
in human populations. Members of this discipline produce descriptions
of health and disease patterns and trends rather than laboratory exper-
iments or case reports. They focus on populations using statistics and
probabilities.
A signicant part of the practice of epidemiology consists of trying to
separate out the patterns of disease and exposure frompatterns caused by
data collection methods. Epidemiologic data can be subject to systematic
error from inuences such as fallible memory or faulty record-keeping.
Such data also can systematically differ from true values based on age or
sex of interviewer, sensitivity of behavior, or time since event. Epidemi-
ologists try to minimize the likelihood that they will confuse patterns of
systematic error with patterns generated from the health-related effects
of age, diet, wealth, exercise, occupation, or other so-called risk factors
that get such attention in the press.
Epidemiologists describe disease patterns using data about the past or
data collected from the present into the future. They use prospective study
designs to follow a group of people over time, tracking their exposure to
potential causes of disease and observing whether rates of disease differ
according to whether or not a person was exposed. For example, a study
might track oral contraceptive use in a group of nurses over 15 years and
conclude that their likelihood of getting breast cancer was inuenced by
whether they took birth control pills. Retrospective studies look at records
or reports of people who already have a disease, comparing the propor-
tion of people who do not have a prior history of a particular behavior or
exposure with the proportion of those who do. For example, researchers
might begin with a group of adults with lung cancer and compare the pro-
portion of smokers and nonsmokers. Epidemiologists make these types of
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comparisons to investigate the factors that increase (or reduce) peoples
probability of acquiring a disease.
When epidemiologists work across different countries and within di-
verse groups in a single country they come inevitably into contact with
cultural difference. It is tempting to think that culture
1
can serve as a new
explanatory variable, capable of predicting and explaining signicant por-
tions of observed variation in behavior and disease. That culture matters
but should not be treated as a single variable is an important premise of
this volume.
I argue throughout this book that epidemiologists should devote the
same attention to culture that they have given to social factors over
the past few decades. Social epidemiology is the branch of epidemiology
that most directly attends to the health-related effects of social organiza-
tion, and in many ways it most closely approximates the goals I outline
in this book. Social epidemiologists look at the health effects of income,
wealth, job stress, class, social support, inequality, and occupation. They
dene societies as groups of people who interact in specic ways, live
in speciable places, and share some common set of values. My treat-
ment of culture parallels how epidemiologists use the word society.
But it leads to closer scrutiny of the unexamined assumptions behind
epidemiologic variables and measurements, takes more account of inter-
national variability, and attends more often to the inuence of categories
and perceptions.
The concept of a cultural epidemiology focused on the health-related ef-
fects of behavior and belief also merits attention. This book emphasizes
culture more than society because I want to argue for a complementary
alternative to social epidemiology, one that focuses attention on disease
classication, meaning, risk, and behavior in addition to social variables
such as income, marital status, and occupation. Culture is less widely ap-
preciated in the epidemiological worldview, but it has explanatory power
and effectiveness comparable to the concept of society. Culture can be
a slippery concept; it both contains and describes many meanings. For
1
The concept of culture has a long history, and the word itself has a long list of denitions.
The anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn (1949) provides several competing denitions, in-
cluding the total way of life of a people, learned behavior, a set of techniques for
adjusting both to the external environment and to other people, and a way of thinking,
feeling, and believing. Clifford Geertz has dened culture as a set of symbols that are
organized into systems of meaning. He wrote, Believing, with Max Weber, that man is
an animal suspended in webs of signicance he himself has spun, I take culture to be
those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of
law but an interpretive one in search of meaning (1973:5). One can distinguish between
culture as a set of patterns for behavior and the patterns of behavior that emerge from a
group following a set of cultural rules over time, akin to the trafc patterns I describe at
the beginning of this chapter.
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6 Introduction
research or policy purposes it is sometimes better unpacked and trans-
formed into smaller, better-dened, operational categories. It is never-
theless useful as an orienting framework, and this book will show how
this can be done and why it matters.
Like epidemiologists, medical anthropologists also search for patterns,
but they nd them in culturally patterned responses to disease. Medical
anthropologists study the afictions facing humankind and how human
groups organize themselves to treat and explain the causes of suffering.
They analyze the understanding and interpretation of healing, illness, and
health, as well as the environmental, biological, behavioral, and cultural
determinants of disease. To do so, they use a variety of methods, includ-
ing long- and short-term eldwork, structured observations, open-ended
interviews, and a variety of survey and group interview techniques.
Both epidemiology and medical anthropology have domestic and in-
ternational applications. Traditionally, epidemiologists tended to study
problems within their national borders, whereas medical anthropologists
tended to study foreign cultures. But diseases rarely respect human bor-
ders, and human beings often cross them. As epidemiologists increasingly
examine patterns of diseases across borders, and as medical anthropol-
ogists increasingly look at cultural diversity within borders, their geo-
graphic scopes have converged. This book therefore will refer to a broad
range of studies undertaken both within the United States and world-
wide (and see Coimbra and Trostle 2004 for related work about Latin
America).
Neither anthropology nor epidemiology is a monolithic discipline. Each
comprises multiple theoretical orientations using a varied but limited set
of common research methods. Some medical anthropologists emphasize
the interpretation of suffering; others assess physical and social adap-
tations to high altitude. Some epidemiologists study disease strains in
a single town, others the movement of diseases across the globe. Thus
some themes within each discipline may lend themselves more readily to
collaboration.
Although my accent in this book is on collaboration between the dis-
ciplines, I also emphasize the unique and separate contributions of each
one. I do this for three reasons: rst, the history and nature of interdis-
ciplinary collaboration between anthropology and epidemiology are still
relatively unexplored. It is therefore important to highlight what methods
and theories each discipline has contributed to prior joint studies. Sec-
ond, when interdisciplinary collaboration is effective but still marginal,
a focus on disciplines makes it easier to explore the separate contribu-
tions of each side toward helping or hindering that collaboration. Third,
I argue that even though medical anthropology and epidemiology do have
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many joint ventures, training programs and research incentives do not
yet push the elds together as often as they could and should. In the ab-
sence of a long interdisciplinary tradition, I hope that my examples and
claims for the relevance of one discipline might spark enthusiasm among
adherents of the other.
For example, froman anthropological perspective, epidemiology is one
particular system of knowledge production; it is, in short, a culture. By
analyzing the categories and assumptions of epidemiologists, anthropol-
ogists see that epidemiologists work within a system of rules and expec-
tations just as do acupuncturists, chiropractors, or shamans. Anthropol-
ogists use the term reexivity to refer to their efforts to understand
their own assumptions, biases, and conventions. But without the benet
of cross-cultural comparison or a tradition of reexivity, epidemiologists
might nd it harder to see cultural inuences in their own work. Most
of their studies are done in and for their own familiar cultures, are based
in biomedical theories of illness causation, and are justied within a par-
ticular research framework that celebrates empirical tests and falsiable
hypotheses. For these reasons, epidemiologists are likely to describe the
rules of their research as dictated by the scientic method not by cultural
rules about professional identity, the qualities of a good measurement, or
the effect of politics in science.
One way to notice that epidemiologists are embedded in culture is to
think about what inuences their measures of disease. Statistical tests,
research designs, risk factor denitions, and disease denitions all rise
and fall in popularity, and their use is not governed solely by objective
assessments of their appropriateness for a given question. For example,
clinical journals have published multiple and competing recommenda-
tions about what kinds of statistical tests should be presented (Sterne
and Davey Smith 2001). Computer-based statistical packages and geo-
graphic information systems make complex tests and visual representa-
tions of quantitative data available to many scientists, when formerly they
were available only to a few. Cheap digital storage on computers facili-
tates collecting and linking massive quantities of patient information, and
privacy laws sometimes help and sometimes hinder the use of that infor-
mation. The categories used to dene and thereby see human groups
vary over time, as shown by the change over the past three decades in
U.S. census categories from Black/White/other to self-identied multi-
ethnic categories (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2001a). And the propor-
tion of important clinical studies that involve epidemiologic research
varies dramatically from country to country (Takahashi et al. 2001), evi-
dence that the disciplines power and prominence is not everywhere the
same.
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8 Introduction
III. Applying an Integrated Cultural-Epidemiological
Approach
Culture inuences the patterning of disease through many pathways,
ranging from who is counted to what is noticed to where people obtain
help for suffering. Its inuence can be seen in the varying ways parents try
to protect their children from the common cold, as well as in the differen-
tial power of epidemiology across nations. More complete understanding
of the range of cultural inuences on disease patterning will come as
more frequent and profound interactions take place between the disci-
plines of medical anthropology and epidemiology, among others. Some
examples of existing collaborative projects are summarized in this volume.
As a start, let us consider a cultural approach to a biomedically accepted
entity, epilepsy, and an epidemiological approach to a culture-specic
syndrome, ataque de nervios.
Peoples understandings about disease and therapy inuence disease
patterns in ways that epidemiologists may not always appreciate. Two
very basic concepts in epidemiology, the description of human disease in
terms of incidence and prevalence, can be used to illustrate this suggestion.
Incidence is the number of people developing a disease over a particular
period of time; an incidence rate compares the number of new cases of
disease within a dened time period with the total number of susceptible
people in a dened population. Incidence matters because it measures the
rate of disease change in a population. If epidemiologists want to know
how rapidly a disease is developing or disappearing, or to gure out why
new cases are appearing, they need to know the incidence of the disease
and investigate incident cases. Incidence can be thought of as measuring
the force or pressure of disease: it describes how quickly disease moves
through populations.
Prevalence, on the other hand, is the number of people having a disease
at a particular point in time, and a prevalence rate compares the number
of existing cases with the total population. Prevalence can be thought
of as measuring the weight, rather than the force, of disease. Prevalence
matters because it measures the burden of disease on a population. If
epidemiologists want to plan treatment programs or measure the needs
of people with a disease in some dened place (no matter whether they
have had the disease for a long or a short time), then they need to know
the prevalence of the disease.
Prevalence is partly inuenced by disease duration. If a disease lasts
a long time in an individual, such as diabetes or asthma, the prevalence
of that disease in the population will usually be larger than its incidence
because more people in the population have the disease at one point in
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An Integrated Cultural-Epidemiological Approach 9
time than develop the disease over a period of time. If a disease like chick-
enpox or an acute respiratory infection lasts a short time in an individual,
incidence in a population will often be larger than prevalence because
many people can get the disease over time but fewer will have it at any
particular point in time.
A. A Cultural Epidemiological Study of Epilepsy
In the nineteenth century, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Professor of
Anatomy at Harvard, said, If I wished to show a student the difcul-
ties of getting at the truth from medical experience, I would give him the
history of epilepsy to read (Holmes 1860). The same could be said of
AIDS or of sickle cell trait today, but even 150 years ago epilepsy had a
long, convoluted, and contradictory history. The medical historian Owsei
Temkins book, The Falling Sickness (1971), recounts how epilepsy has
been seen variously over time as a disease caused by spirits, demons,
gods, nature, and human will, although physicians now speak quite con-
dently about this syndrome that they know, measure, diagnose, and
treat. The cultural meanings of epilepsy have affected whether and how
it becomes visible to epidemiologists and what this means for estimates
of its incidence, prevalence, causes, and outcomes.
Epilepsy is the most common serious condition seen by neurologists.
It is estimated to have an annual incidence of about 50 per 100,000 in in-
dustrialized countries and a prevalence of about 5 to 6 per 1,000 (Hauser
and Kurland 1975). The lifetime risk of any individual having a seizure
is about 5%. For physicians, epilepsy is a brain disorder characterized by
recurrent seizures caused by abnormal electrical activity (uncoordinated
electrical discharges) in the brain. From a clinical point of view, epilepsy
is the name for a group of disorders characterized by recurrent seizures,
which can manifest as jerking motions of particular limbs, sensations and
thoughts, or convulsions of the whole body.
Neurologists think of epilepsy as having two components: the seizures
themselves and their underlying cause. They can treat the seizures with
anticonvulsant medication, but they can rarely explain why seizures
develop in the rst place. When a patient asks, Why me?, the doc-
tor often does not know. Nor can a doctor specify when the seizures
might stop. Physicians label epilepsy a chronic disease, yet patients ex-
perience seizures as sporadic and (usually) unpredictable events. They
wonder how long they must be seizure-free to be considered epilepsy-
free, and they wonder how they will know whether they are seizure-
free while they remain on anticonvulsant medication. This combination
of factors uncertainties about the cause, the prognosis, and the end
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10 Introduction
point encourages people with epilepsy to develop their own explana-
tions for the condition and to adjust their medications accordingly.
So how can the concept of culture help us understand incidence and
prevalence? A cultural-epidemiological approach shows that local mean-
ings and management strategies for this disease inuence the number
and severity of cases that come to the attention of epidemiologists and
thus help to determine whose disease gets counted and how disabling the
disease looks. It employs both of the meanings of culture introduced ear-
lier in this chapter: a set of beliefs and practices learned and transmitted
through time, and a set of contingent processes subject to manipula-
tion and change. Through the prism of epilepsy, and of seizures more
generally, we can see how symptoms and prognosis, personal and social
reactions, and categorization and measurement all help to create patterns
of disease in populations.
Olmsted County, Minnesota, has been the site of an important epi-
demiologic study of epilepsy in the community since the mid-1950s. Al-
most all residents of Olmsted County receive their health care from the
Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and other health facilities in the
county also make their records available for study by Mayo personnel.
When I worked at Mayo in 1985 I studied the medical records of 199
county residents aged 18 to 59 who received care for epilepsy. I inter-
viewed 127 adults from this group who had active epilepsy (dened as
having had a seizure or taken anticonvulsants within ve years prior to
January 1, 1980). My objective was to understand the differences be-
tween physician and patient perspectives on epilepsy, its impact, and its
care.
Interviewees were asked a series of closed and open-ended questions
about how they managed their condition, what they thought had caused
it, what others thought of it, and what differences it had made in their
lives. Some of the respondents used biomedical language to describe their
condition, labeling their seizures as grand or petit mal and talking about
seeing the results of brain scans or brain waves. But they also used a large
variety of nonmedical terms to describe their seizures, including fainting
or dizzy spells, zonking out, passing out, sleeping spells, blackouts, pop-
ping off, and jumps. Some attributed seizures to stress, diet, or emotional
pressure, even when physicians were unable to conrmsuch connections.
Seventy-nine percent of 127 people mentioned classical biomedical cat-
egories (illness, trauma, physiologic problems) as the ultimate cause of
their seizures (i.e., why they were susceptible to having seizures), even
though physicians identied causes in only 14% (Trostle 1987:2428).
When explaining what triggered particular seizures, these respondents
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resorted primarily to categories of stress or emotions (55% of respon-
dents), sleep deprivation (26%), or tiredness (21%).
The following quotes illustrate a few of the ways residents of Rochester
described their epilepsy. Esther was a middle-aged married housewife,
a high school graduate who used to be an ofce manager. Her seizures
started in high school, and she stopped taking anticonvulsant medication
after 5 years without a seizure. Her seizures started again about 10 years
after she stopped taking anticonvulsant medication:
I just have a problem. I dont know why. They still havent said, Youre an epilep-
tic. They say, Because youve had it this many years you must have a seizure
disorder, but we dont know what it is. But its still abnormal if you fall and
break your leg, thats normal this isnt.
George was a 19-year-old drug store clerk with one year of college who
was now living at home. His seizures began when he was 8 and continued
until he was 16. He said he thought his seizures started originally because
of some insufciency in my system. He wasnt quite sure whether they
were seizures or not. He said his mother urged him to call his seizures
sleeping spells:
My doctor says these are seizures something not controlled from me, but from
body chemistry. But my social worker says these are anxiety attacks. I think that
means I cause them myself theyre my fault. Right now I think they are anx-
iety attacks, but my doctor . . . Most people think that their doctor is God, so
I guess since he said theyre seizures, theyre seizures. So . . . whatever he says,
goes. But I just wonder if they are anxiety attacks. Like wondering why Id think
Id not had one in a while, then have one later, just a few hours after thinking
about it.
These passages highlight the distance between what people know from
their doctors about their epilepsy and what they would like to knowabout
their epilepsy. Esther is concerned about the absence of a label for her
condition and about whether to call it a normal disease. George wants
to nd who or what is responsible for his seizures. He struggles between
his doctors offer of chemistry as culprit and his social workers implicit
suggestion that seizures are brought on by his own anxiety.
Studies I later did in Ecuador and Kenya among people with epileptic
seizures showed they had quite different interpretations of their illness.
People in the highland north of Ecuador often mentioned pent-up rage,
frustration, suffering, and nerves as causes of particular seizures, while
they used heredity to explain why one was exposed to the possibility
of having seizures in the rst place. In Kenya, physical causes such as
malaria, bad blood, and trauma were mentioned as causes of seizures by
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12 Introduction
people in the Rift Valley, as were cognitive processes such as thinking
about problems or imagining things. Some in Kenya thought epilepsy
was contagious, particularly if one touched a person with epilepsy during
the seizure. Consequently, in rural areas where people cooked over open
res, some people were not moved away from res during their seizures.
Fully one-third of the 89 people I interviewed in Kenya bore large keloid
scars from such burns, further stigmatizing them. Some thought epilepsy
was a formof supernatural punishment for their misdeeds. Strikingly, few
people with epilepsy in Kenya identied epilepsy as something involving
the brain: 71% of interviewees said their seizures were originally caused
by malaria, 13% said they were caused by pneumonia, and only 13%
called it epilepsy.
The narratives of people from Ecuador and Kenya reect quite differ-
ent strategies of understanding where their seizures came from and how
they should be managed fromthose of the Minnesotans. One striking dif-
ference in these strategies is the use of both biomedical and nonbiomed-
ical types of health resources, as well as recourse to (or explicit rejection
of) supernatural explanations of seizure causation. This is how Isabel, a
middle-aged woman from a small town in highland Ecuador, explained
the origin of her seizures and how she took care of them:
Well, it must be about three years ago, three years it must be, when I had it the
rst time. The rst time I had an attack (ataque) was late one Sunday afternoon.
I was here alone, and then my brother and his wife took me right away to the
hospital, where I spent eight days. They took good care of me there, but I cant
tell you what medication I took because I dont remember. They gave me pills,
injections, and an intravenous solution. They said. . . The Doctor said it was from
all the nervousness that I had and thats what caused this to happen. After three
months I went back. They gave me some more injections, no pills. They told me
not to be so nervous. When I get nervous I should go do something else, take a
walk or go to a party.
About six months later I had another one. Then I went back to the hospital, and
they gave me these pills. I took them every once in a while, when I felt quite
nervous, or when I thought I would lose consciousness. I took a pill with water
from malva olorosa, a plant which grows around here which is really good for
nerves.
I never thought this came from mal hecho [sorcery] because if it had, it would
have continued to be bad. I wouldnt have been able to cure it with the medicine
I took. Look, I came to have this problem with my nerves because I was living
mostly by myself, so I worried a lot about the same things over and over again. My
husband had a business. He went to work elsewhere, and sometimes he said hed
come home and he didnt, so I worried. The people around here are different;
theyre not so good now. You might say theyre troublemakers. They try to rob
you, so I started to think maybe they hit my husband, maybe he got assaulted.
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Maybe thats why he didnt come home yet. So thats why these started: little by
little, this is what caused these attacks. Its not that someone hexed me.
Mary, a mother of a 10-year-old boy with seizures who lived in a
medium-sized town in Kenya, used different words to describe her ideas
about epilepsy and how she sought treatment for him. Note her mention
of a broad variety of health resources quite different from those men-
tioned in the Ecuadorian case. Also note the complex consultations with
multiple practitioners when cures did not work as promised, as well as
the perceived need to hide use of local traditional healers for fear of being
accused of practicing witchcraft.
This illness was rst caused by malaria and pneumonia. When he rst got this
illness, we rushed him to the hospital. After we visited the hospital, our relatives
told us to go and see a mganga [curer]. They said he inherited the illness. Some
friends tell us to take the child to the curer, while others tell us to take him to
Kenyatta Hospital, where we will get doctors who know what the illness is. We
decided to go to a mganga because at Kenyatta Hospital one cant just be treated
unless you know somebody.
We took the child to three doctors. The last place discharged him when he felt a
little bit better. They said he was cured. But he wasnt.
We went to three traditional healers to cure him. The rst one said the child had
inherited the illness. He told us to take a chicken and a goats head to him. We
did. He slaughtered the chicken the same day before we left. I dont knowwhether
he ate it or not. The second healer told us the child had inherited the illness. He
asked for a chicken and a bird called chaluu so that he could exchange the illness
with those things. The boys father decided not to take the things because the
illness was persisting even after visiting the rst healer, and he was already tired
of their treatment.
The third healer asked for a red chicken and a goat. We took the chicken but not
the goat. He looked at it and said that the toes of the chicken should be removed
and tied to the child for three days. We could tie the chicken nails on at night
and take them off in the morning. We feared our son would be seen with such
stuff when at school, and people might charge us with practicing witchcraft. This
didnt work, either.
In Minnesota, respondents with epilepsy tended to explain the causes
of their condition using biomedical language, even when their own physi-
cians would not or could not. In Ecuador, an emotional idiom was used,
referring to nerves, and the dangers of fear, anger, and frustration. In
Kenya, epilepsy was sufciently stigmatized that people with the diagnosis
labeled it as a manifestation of malaria instead. Seizures demand an ex-
planation, and explanations lead to a series of help-seeking and treatment
strategies. Local culture provides the interpretive frameworks, which the
anthropologist classies as biological, personal, or supernatural, without
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14 Introduction
making judgments as to whether they are plausible or true according to
biomedical standards. Two of the causal categories recognized by people
with epilepsy emotional stress and supernatural interference are not
commonly recognized in biomedicine as causes of disease. When suffer-
ers attribute causes to nervousness or the supernatural, they often resort
to nonbiomedical healing traditions, or they mix biomedicine with other
traditions. They may take anticonvulsant pills with stress-reducing teas
as Isabel did or combine hospital visits with treatments by indigenous
curers as Mary did. And they watch carefully to see what seems to work.
In the United States and elsewhere, patients suffer from the label
epilepsy, as well as the disease. Because ongoing use of medications
for epilepsy is part of the medical denition of a case of epilepsy, pa-
tients face incentives to stop taking their medications to see if they will
have a seizure. Also, the diagnostic label hinders daily life because most
forms of insurance are more expensive for people with epilepsy, and a
drivers license is sometimes impossible to retain. People therefore feel
pressured to rid themselves of the diagnosis as soon as possible. This is
one reason Georges mother urged himto label his seizures sleeping spells
instead.
Physicians (and especially neurologists) also have a stake in the deni-
tion of epilepsy. They help to determine its incidence and prevalence be-
cause they decide whether and when to apply the diagnosis of epilepsy,
and they are responsible for deciding when a patient should no longer
be considered an epileptic. But in some respects they serve the gov-
ernment in a set of surveillance and assessment functions that extend
beyond counting for public health purposes. For example, they establish
the severity of a case and whether it poses limits to safe driving or work
capacity. They also help to determine eligibility for government disability
payments. Because the treatment for epilepsy has specic and sometimes
deleterious side effects, physicians determine who must continue to be
treated and for how long. There is a complex social negotiation between
doctor and patient, and a patients interest in avoiding or limiting the
diagnosis of epilepsy may complicate the physicians task.
Epilepsy also poses a challenge to epidemiologists eager to group cases
and explore their common features. Epidemiologists of epilepsy focus on
three dening characteristics: presence of more than one seizure, tim-
ing of the most recent seizure (within the past ve years), and behavior
(patient still taking anticonvulsant medications). But these criteria are
far from ideal. They require accurate surveillance and reporting, and
they are inuenced by individual patient desires to eliminate the disease
label by stopping the medication or by underreporting seizure activity.
Some of the miscommunication may be intentional, but epilepsy is also a
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neurological problemthat can affect cognition and memory. Can respon-
dents clearly describe their past seizures? Can they recall past exposure
to potential causes of epilepsy? The physiology and experience of this
condition inuence how it is reported and by whom, and this also helps
determine measures of its incidence and prevalence.
People with epilepsy do not necessarily even want to be visible in the
general population (Beran et al. 1985). This has implications for epidemi-
ologists who want to know what functional limitations the condition may
cause because there may be systematic differences in intellectual ability
and level of handicap between those who can hide their condition and
those who cannot. For this reason, epilepsy may look particularly dis-
abling among those attending specialty clinics and more benign among
people with epilepsy in the general population, who may not be receiving
specialty care. This is another area where epidemiologic results can be
inuenced by patterns of service use.
By combined anthropological and epidemiological approaches, my
study in Rochester, Minnesota, showed that published reports from spe-
cialized treatment clinics overestimated the social damage created by
epilepsy compared with studies conducted among the general popula-
tion (Trostle 1987). Before this study, almost all published reports of the
outcomes of epilepsy came from sources able to marshal relatively large
numbers of cases, primarily specialty clinic populations or members of
service-based groups such as the Epilepsy Foundation of America or self-
help groups. These groups could be expected to show more severe prob-
lems than community-based samples because they include more people
who have current management problems, are more severely aficted, or
are less able to cope with their illness. Indeed, Figure 1.1 shows that my
pure community-based sample in Rochester had the lowest frequency of
problems; mixed self-help and clinic groups had the middle level; and a
pure clinic-based sample had the most problems.
Does this mean that prior research wrongly described the types of prob-
lems associated with epilepsy? It may have overstated the frequency of
such problems among all people with epilepsy by assuming that cases
drawn from specialty care centers represent those in the community at
large this is the essence of what epidemiologists call selection bias. But
in fact the problem of generalizing from clinic to community cuts both
ways. It can underestimate as well as overestimate problems: if groups
like urban minorities are less likely to seek medical care for seizures, then
they may be even more negatively affected by epilepsy than clinic-based
studies would suggest. This is why it is necessary to pay attention to the
social location of cases, to specify more completely the variable effects of
epilepsy among different groups.
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16 Introduction
Figure 1.1. Comparison of percentages of subjects in three samples
(clinic, mixed community and clinic, and pure community) with prob-
lem scores in four regions of elevation on a Psychosocial Functioning
Scale of the Washington Psychosocial Seizure Inventory. Source: Trostle
et al. 1989:635. Copyright by Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins, 1989.
From the point of view of epidemiology, epilepsy offers a lesson for
how measurement tools themselves can raise the status of some medi-
cal conditions and ignore others. Epilepsy was relatively unimportant on
the worldwide disease priority list when diseases were ranked according
to their contribution to infant or child mortality because it rarely kills.
Epilepsy also was neglected because its symptoms resemble some stig-
matized types of mental illness. The condition began to get increased
research attention and funding following development of new ranking
systems for diseases, particularly the Disability-Adjusted Life Year, or
DALY, developed by the World Bank in 1993. Because the DALY mea-
sured the disabling potential of diseases in addition to their mortality and
duration, epilepsy jumped to prominence. The World Bank labeled it as
one of the 10 most important diseases among all children 5 to 14 years of
age in developing countries (World Bank 1993). It exacted its toll through
school withdrawal, social isolation, and inability to nd work. The DALY
method of categorizing disease allowed the detrimental effects of epilepsy
to become more visible, thus increasing the research attention and health
service funding directed at this condition.
Epilepsy is noninfectious and chronic; it disables both young and old. It
poses a number of challenges to epidemiologists who would study its inci-
dence and prevalence or public health practitioners who seek to prevent it.
Because it is dened largely by its symptoms (seizures), diagnosis depends
P1: Kad
largely on patient or observer report. Because its symptoms are episodic
or even rare, it resists those trying to dene duration or the onset of new
events. Epilepsy illustrates how individual and household management
of disease channels people into different healing systems, where varied
diagnoses and therapies are offered. Its culture-specic interpretations
illustrate the discrepancies between lay and professional explanations of
cause, course, and consequence.
In summary, the incidence and prevalence of epilepsy are inuenced
by many forces, some natural and some social and cultural. Its symptoms
prompt specic reactions (e.g., social isolation) and explanations (e.g.,
biochemical imbalance, supernatural force) that vary from place to place
even when the symptoms do not. And these reactions and explanations
in turn inuence other aspects of the epidemiology of the condition
its association in rural Kenya with keloid scars from burns from kitchen
res, for example, or its disabling potential, and even peoples willingness
to acknowledge its existence. Peoples reactions to disease can inuence
epidemiology because epidemiology is primarily an observational science
that relies on peoples reports. (This issue will be further discussed in
Chapter 4.)
B. A Cultural-Epidemiological Study of Ataques de Nervios
Imagine Rosa, a middle-aged woman from Puerto Rico who moved with
her family to New York City in 1953. This was toward the beginning
of a major shift of population from Puerto Rico to the mainland United
States, one that in a single decade would turn New York City into what
some called the largest city in Puerto Rico. Rosa cared deeply for her
children, and when her oldest son died in a trafc accident in 1958 she
was inconsolable. Her crying became more intense at the funeral, and on
her departure fromthe building she collapsed to the ground, unconscious
and shaking.
Had this happened at her former home in Puerto Rico, her relatives
would probably have known she was having a nervous attack, or ataque
de nervios, prompted by extreme grief. Such ataques were an acceptable
cultural response to strong emotions like grief and anger. There people
would have known Rosa needed her family to rally around her, and they
would perhaps have taken her to a local espiritista (spirit medium) for a
spiritual cleansing that would help heal her grief. But in New York City
the funeral home director thought she was having some kind of epileptic
seizure and called an ambulance.
Rosa was taken to the emergency room, where physicians found she
had none of the signs of an epileptic seizure. They suspected this to be
P1: Kad
18 Introduction
some sort of mental breakdown, and they referred Rosa to a psychiatrist.
But Rosa and her family were offended that the hospital staff thought she
was crazy, and they refused to return to the hospital. By now physicians
had seen many of these types of seizures among Puerto Ricans, so many
that a psychiatrist wrote an article in 1961 titled, The Puerto Rican
Syndrome (Fern andez-Marina 1961). The thesis of this and similar ar-
ticles published around that time was that Puerto Ricans were partic-
ularly unsophisticated at managing their emotions and were somehow
culturally predisposed to having these kinds of hysterical displays. But
this reaction revealed more about clinicians lack of cultural knowledge
about Puerto Ricans than it did about mental and emotional processes
among Puerto Ricans. An ataque accepted in one land became a syn-
drome denigrated in another (Harwood 1977). This translation involved
the movement of Puerto Rican people into new places and their trans-
formation from a dominant group into a minority group.
Seizures are a dramatic instance of loss of bodily control, and they
often prompt some kind of social response. But not all dramatic body
movements are epileptic, the product of uncontrolled storms of neurons
ring in the brain. Trance states, fainting spells, trembling limbs, and
facial contortions are all socially recognized ways to manifest a variety
of types of acute distress. A large variety of such non-epileptic seizure
categories have been identied in the United States, ranging from what
is called jumping Frenchman in Maine to falling out in Georgia and
Florida to moth madness in Arizona. The ataques de nervios in Puerto
Rico also have been described in the Dominican Republic and elsewhere
in Latin America, and many other shaking syndromes exist elsewhere.
These categories do not correspond to any neurological diagnosis;
rather they are examples of what have been called idioms of distress
or culture-bound syndromes. Labels like these acknowledge that some
forms of distress do not match any existing biomedical diagnoses yet form
a coherent set of symptoms that are consistent across sites.
How does one study the causes and prevalence and consequences of
such indicators of human distress when they cannot be traced to an elec-
troencephalogram reading or brain tumor and have labels not developed
by physicians? For much of the 1960s descriptions of ataques came from
emergency room patients, and they were thought to be a problem limited
primarily to Puerto Rican patients. But in the 1970s anthropologists with
an interest in medicine and psychology began to look at nervios in other
sites and discovered that these types of physical responses to stress had
many names and existed in many places (Low 1985, Weidman 1979). A
study in Miami in the early 1970s looked at eight months of reports of
instances where emergency services were requested. A team of scientists
P1: Kad
removed all instances of epilepsy, trauma, fainting, heart trouble, dia-
betes, alcohol use, and the like and found that about 12%of the 3700 case
reports might have been the kinds of seizures, semi-conscious, and un-
conscious states described as ataques or as falling out (Leey 1979). This
study found cases of falling out to be more prevalent in the Black popu-
lation than in the Latino or Anglo population, and most common among
Latinas and male Blacks and Whites. But all these estimates were tem-
pered by the fact that the researchers had little detail about exactly what
caused the request for emergency services, and they had to wonder
whether their gures might have been inuenced by the likelihood with
which different groups (classied by age, gender, skin color, ethnicity, or
physical condition) would call for emergency services in the rst place
rather than calling a private physician or doing nothing.
More complex and valid designs were used to study ataques in Puerto
Rico and in Mexico in the 1990s. In Puerto Rico, as a result of collabora-
tion between anthropologists, epidemiologists, and psychiatrists, a survey
of psychological symptoms was given to a large population after a series of
damaging storms in the mid-1980s. The survey asked specically about
ataques de nervios among other symptoms, and it found that about 16%
of respondents reported having had one (Guarnaccia et al. 1993). They
were more common among middle-aged women who had not nished
high school but who had formerly been married. Since the survey design
allowed people who reported having ataques to be compared with people
who had not, Guarnaccia and colleagues were able to compare rates of
psychiatric diagnoses between the two groups. They found that people
who reported ataques were far more likely to be depressed, anxious, and
suicidal than those who had not. In sum, ataques in Puerto Rico did not
overlap exclusively with any single psychiatric disorder. They seem to
be both a way to describe a set of symptoms that occur to people who
are severely anxious or depressed and a way to explain and to promote
particular kinds of reactions to stressful family events.
A similar study of the prevalence and causes of nervios was undertaken
in Mexico (Salgado de Snyder et al. 2000). Random sampling of rural
populations was done in two regions, and respondents were asked if they
had ever had nervios. About 16% of this sample also responded posi-
tively, with nervios again more common among women than men. The
authors concluded that nervios in Mexico do not overlap with any exist-
ing biomedical category. Rather they are part of a deteriorating process
that weakens both body and mind, constituting a cry for help that may
lead to more serious mental and physical dysfunction (2000:467).
In summary, collaborative projects between anthropologists, epidemi-
ologists, and others interested in the frequency and causes of mental
P1: Kad
20 Introduction
disorders have shown that epidemiological tools and concepts can also
be applied to forms of disease that do not match well with biomedical
categories and diagnoses. Some have called for programs of research that
would link anthropology, epidemiology, and clinical research to study
culture-bound syndromes such as nervios (Guarnaccia and Rogler 1999).
This is a positive step, for it suggests that the accumulating evidence about
the level and type of illness and distress in a population is not based solely
on cases of patients who come to seek medical treatment or cases that
easily t established biomedical categories. These are steps toward mea-
suring the burden of disease as perceived by the population in addition to
that perceived by medical professionals. (This issue is discussed in more
detail in Chapter 7.)
As with epilepsy, the label of nervios helps to determine where people
get treated and whether they get counted in standard epidemiologic stud-
ies. The physical symptomcalled a seizure is prompted by a broad variety
of both physical and mental causes and is treated by a broad variety of
health practitioners. Epidemiologic methods can be used to study the
incidence and prevalence of many types of seizures and when combined
with anthropological and sociological methods can yield more complex,
satisfying, and culturally sensitive explanations of cause and cure.
FOR FURTHER READING
Berkman L. F. and I. Kawachi, eds. 2000. Social Epidemiology. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Fadiman A. 1996. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. New York: Farrar
Straus and Giroux.
Gordis L. 2000. Epidemiology. 2nd edition. Philadelphia: Saunders.
HahnR. A. 1995. Sickness and Healing: An Anthropological Perspective. NewHaven:
Yale University Press.
Janes C. R., R. Stall, and S. Gifford, eds. 1986. Anthropology and Epidemiology.
Dordrecht: Reidel.
Stolley P. D. and T. Lasky. 1995. Investigating Disease Patterns: The Science of
Epidemiology. New York: Scientic American Library.
Young T. K. 1998. Population Health: Concepts and Methods. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
P1: ICD/JZK P2: JZP/JZK
2 The Origins of an Integrated Approach
in Anthropology and Epidemiology
Medical anthropology and epidemiology began from a common
objective, namely to explain the health of human populations using obser-
vational techniques. But with a few notable exceptions, medical anthro-
pologists and epidemiologists rarely had much to do with one another
until the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Epidemiologists interested in history commonly trace the origins of
their discipline back 2400 years to Hippocratic texts, particularly, Airs,
Waters, Places, which emphasized environmental factors (seasons, winds,
water, position, and soil) in disease causation. But Hippocrates also dis-
cussed diseases as attributes of populations, and he emphasized the eti-
ologic signicance of the mode of life of a towns populace: whether
they are heavy drinkers, taking lunch, and inactive; or athletic, industri-
ous, eating much and drinking little (Hippocrates 1957:73). Thus an
interest in what today might be called behavioral or social causes of
disease predates the terms themselves and certainly comes long before
the scientic disciplines organized to investigate them.
Today we divide such health-related knowledge into such elds as med-
ical anthropology, social epidemiology, medical sociology, bioinformat-
ics, and psychoneuroimmunology. Such labeling seems both inevitable
and natural it is hard to think about how else we might categorize
our knowledge. But of course, the boundaries between disciplines are
not sacrosanct. Integrating knowledge across disciplines involves both
communicating ideas across themand recognizing, respecting, and using
ideas from multiple disciplines. As we shall see in recounting the history
of early anthropological and epidemiological collaborations, interdisci-
plinary exchanges are most productive when researchers work together to
dene their questions, objectives, designs, methods, and analyses. Disci-
plines often impede such collaboration when they proclaimthemselves to
be the sole owners and only legitimate investigators of particular domains
of research and knowledge. In addition, the specialized journals, technical
language, and accepted techniques that facilitate communication within
each discipline also impede communication outside it. Moreover, the
21
22 Origins of an Integrated Approach
forces that allow some disciplines to capture resources and power pre-
vent other disciplines from entering into interdisciplinary collaboration
as equals. Yet attention to common questions and problems, as we shall
see, promotes the integration of approaches.
I. Scientic Attention to the Social Environment
in the Nineteenth Century
The origins of exchanges between anthropologists and epidemiologists go
back at least to the mid-nineteenth century (Trostle 1986a). Both disci-
plines were founded at about that time and developed in an environment
characterized by rapid social change with dramatic consequences for hu-
man health. Factory production fostered urban migration and hazardous
working conditions, while scientists and social activists, attuned to the
upheaval, examined the impact of these changes on human health.
In parallel, a broad set of theoretical, technological, and bureaucratic
developments during the nineteenth century helped to create a focus on
disease in populations. In the eighteenth century the medical research
had shifted from an emphasis on bodily humors such as blood and bile
to a concern with bodily structures such as hearts and skin; only then
did health-related research come to focus on specic diseases (Shryock
1961:94). Accurate quantitative descriptions of specic diseases could
occur only after they could be identied with a level of certainty and
consistency (Susser 1973); thus epidemiologic measurements such as
incidence or prevalence were also contingent on the quality of disease
diagnosis.
In the eighteenth century hospitals also changed fromplaces of lodging
to places to treat the sick. This was critical to accurate diagnosis because it
allowed sophisticated procedures to be developed. Physicians working in
hospitals began to see for the rst time beyond the particularities of their
own practices; they could examine many patients with the same disease,
be it rare or epidemic. Consistent and general diagnostic portraits of a
disease thus could be built out of many individual cases (Ackerknecht
1967, Foucault 1973) and in turn could be used to improve the accuracy
of diagnosis. This allowed researchers to count similar cases of specic
diseases and conditions.
But accurate studies of diseases in populations depend on numerators
and denominators; that is, they require that cases of disease be compared
with a completely measured population at risk. Diagnostic sophistication
alone, which would only affect a numerator, was not sufcient. Methods
of record-keeping to ascertain population denominators also were im-
portant. At about the same time that diagnostic methods were changing,
Scientic Attention to the Social Environment 23
so too were nation-states developing systems of record-keeping and vital
statistics (Rosen 1955:39).
Finally, even as the body politic was being explored and constructed
through census techniques, the interiors of individual bodies were be-
ing revealed via new technologies. The stethoscope appeared in 1819 in
France, the compound microscope in the 1830s in England, the oph-
thalmoscope and the laryngoscope in the 1850s in Germany; and tissue
staining at various sites in the 1870s. Each of these tools of observation
and measurement created newclasses of knowledge, and they allowed re-
searchers to concentrate on more carefully dened categories of disease
and agent. These new tools of measurement also narrowed the scientists
eld of view: a wide-angled concern with the social environment tapered
toward the end of the nineteenth century to focus on the biological. The
analysis of pathogens largely replaced the analysis of poverty.
A. Early Uses of Fieldwork in Epidemiology
Today, eldwork is one of the hallmarks of training in anthropology. An-
thropologists dene themselves in part by where and how they do eld-
work. They do research among the homeless in New York City, in a town
in rural Spain, on a plantation in Papua New Guinea, or in multiple
sites, and they do it through long-term immersion and learning a local
language, through a translator, or on short, intense visits. But eldwork
also has a longstanding tradition in epidemiology. In the mid-nineteenth
century researchers did eldwork to trace the origins and course of illness
through populations. The best known of these investigations is probably
that of John Snow (1855) on cholera. Snow has been called the proto-
typical eld epidemiologist. His 1855 paper On the Mode of Commu-
nication of Cholera is a methodical, well-documented argument for a
contagious and water-borne transmission of cholera. (The causal agent
of cholera, the vibrio cholerae, would not be identied for another 30 years
after this paper was published.)
Snow examined the pathology of cholera as a clue to the manner of
its communication. For example, he noted that cholera infections com-
menced in the alimentary canal, and he reasoned that such a focus of rst
infection suggested that a substance had been ingested. He then presented
examples of the spread of the disease in mines, row houses, and entire
neighborhoods, and in this process he isolated important factors in the
transmission of the disease. Snow mapped the topography of a cholera
outbreak near Cambridge and Broad streets in London by means of a
painstaking door-to-door survey, and he isolated the probable source of
the epidemic to a particular well. His subsequent removal of the Broad
Street pump handle as a preventive measure has taken on great historical
and symbolic signicance.
Fieldwork like that performed by Snow was undertaken as part of the
struggle between miasmatists (who believed that epidemics were caused
by decaying matter circulating in the atmosphere) and contagionists (who
believed that epidemics were caused by infectious organisms spread by
contact or vapor, or via contaminated articles). With each group contin-
uing to marshal empirical evidence in support of its theories, eldwork
became a common way to investigate the health effects of the environ-
ment in the latter half of the nineteenth century (Ackerknecht 1948,
Terris 1985). The term shoe-leather epidemiologist is used still to dis-
tinguish those who collect data themselves out in the community from
those who use existing databases.
It is an ironic historical twist that epidemiologists were committed to
eldwork before anthropologists invented long-termparticipant observa-
tion. Nineteenth-century anthropologists were more concerned with the
history of institutions and ideas than with going to the eld to collect data
(Asad 1994:57). Anthropologists really did not begin to see eldwork as
an essential part of their discipline until the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, with expeditions to the Torres Straits and the Pacic
Northwest.
Peter Panum, a Danish physician credited with describing the epidemi-
ology of measles, did signicant amounts of ethnographic eldwork dur-
ing his mid-nineteenth-century investigation of the causes of a measles
epidemic on the isolated Faeroe Islands. Although Panum had no an-
thropological training, his 1847 report illustrates how valuable eldwork
can be for researchers who work in unfamiliar environments. The report
opens with a strong plea:
When a physician is called to work in a place where climatic and dietary conditions
are different from those to which he has been accustomed, his rst problem is to
study the hygienic factors which affect the state of health of the inhabitants. It is,
in fact, these hygienic conditions which contribute towards the development and
frequency of some diseases and the exclusion or rarity of others, and which more
or less modify the symptoms of every disease. (1940 [1847]:3)
Panum wrote a quasi-ethnographic account of his ve-month stay on
the islands, describing the geography, climate, vegetation, physical condi-
tions, and mode of life of the Faroese (including food preparation, hous-
ing construction and layout, clothing style, and occupation). He included
these and other social conditions as part of a catalogue of potentially rele-
vant causes of disease, although he had no explicit theory of multifactorial
causation.
Scientic Attention to the Social Environment 25
The German physician Rudolf Virchow was among the rst to link
eldwork more closely to explicit theories about the role of society in
the causation of disease. Virchows biographer wrote that his report to
the government about a typhoid epidemic in the famine-ridden province
of Upper Silesia in 1848 is an unusual and original document. Its
ne clinical and pathological ndings are embedded into an amazingly
competent anthropological (sociological) and epidemiological analysis
(Ackerknecht 1953:15). Virchow blamed the government for the epi-
demic and famine; he prescribed education, freedom, and prosperity as
lasting solutions, in addition to the short-term palliatives of food aid or
newdrugs. Like Panum, Virchowwas able to make concrete links between
social conditions and disease outcomes based on his physical presence on
the site, doing eldwork and careful observation.
B. Social Causes of Disease and Death
Virchow also offered ideas about how social revolution inuences epi-
demic diseases. He labeled as articial those epidemics that concen-
trated among the poor, determined by living and working conditions,
and as natural those that were more evenly distributed among social
classes (Ackerknecht 1953). Social justice, education, self-government,
separation of church and state these would decrease articial epidemics
like those he had seen in Upper Silesia.
Whereas Virchowmade social reforma political essential, a fewdecades
later the French sociologist Emile Durkheimhelped to create strong theo-
retical arguments for focusing on the social causes of disease. Durkheims
book, Suicide (1951 [1897]), argues that suicide can be analyzed as a pat-
terned social phenomenon. It is not only a private decision or individual
act of will but a social practice following stable patterns of number and
type. Durkheims contribution was important both for its message and
its timing. He upheld the legitimacy of examining social causes of dis-
ease just when germ theory was starting to dominate epidemiological
research. Although Durkheim is not cited often as a major contributor
to the history of epidemiology, his insights into the collective and social
forces that affect individuals foreshadowed most of contemporary social
epidemiology (Krieger 2001, Trostle 1986a).
The popularity of including a broad range of social factors in studies
of population health was waning by the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, in part because clinical researchers were searching for single
causes for specic diseases and in part because social researchers were
more interested in the evolution than the function of society. Research on
diseases such as tuberculosis, syphilis, and pellagra continued to include
social factors because the role of human contact was so obviously critical
to understanding disease transmission. But attention to the etiological in-
uence of the social environment would not resurface until the third and
fourth decades of the twentieth century, when chronic diseases such as
cancer, heart disease, and diabetes began to dominate the industrialized
worlds disease prole. Chronic diseases were not as easily explained by
single-cause models. In addition, national governments faced increasing
pressure to provide adequate health services, so they began to sponsor
research on how to design, provide, and assess medical care and preven-
tion programs. Chronic disease epidemiology and community medicine
thus helped to revitalize research on the health effects of society and cul-
ture, although contagious disease epidemics, like the inuenza pandemic
of 19181919, also helped to rekindle research interest in the host and
environment (Gordon 1953:61, Kolata 1999).
The renewed interest in the social environment in the 1920s and 1930s
did not include the political overtones and sweeping environmental and
political changes that had been advocated in the mid-nineteenth century.
This partly was because the successes of bacteriology provided more spe-
cic measures of intervention than had been available earlier. It also was
because clinical medicine was a focus of hope for developing effective
new treatments. National health insurance and/or national health ser-
vices were generating increasing interest in Great Britain, the European
continent, the USSR, the United States, and South Africa. Reform pre-
dominated over revolution; researchers developed new treatments and
new health programs, and argued for new legislation, rather than push-
ing for dramatic social structural changes.
II. Epidemiology and Medical Anthropology
in Collaboration
A. Returning to Social Medicine: A South African Experiment
One such experiment in constructing a national health service began in
South Africa in the late 1930s, culminating in the founding of the Pholela
(also spelled Polela) Health Center in 1940 and the Institute of Family
and Community Health (IFCH) in 1945. Pholela was a small rural clinic
where an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, epidemiologists, and health
workers rst worked out the ideas of community health care used over the
next ve decades. Pholela is to international primary care what the city
of Framingham, Massachusetts, is to the epidemiology of heart disease:
a place where pioneering methods led to critical new knowledge.
Epidemiology and Medical Anthropology in Collaboration 27
The Pholela project merits extended attention here because it was the
rst health-care service specically designed to assess the health status
of a community using social science and epidemiologic methods. It drew
on those assessments to develop and evaluate a comprehensive multi-
disciplinary approach to improving community health. Many of the as-
sumptions guiding research at Pholela were similar to those explored
by nineteenth-century proponents of social medicine: poverty and social
class are important determinants of health; social and cultural change
affect the transmission of illness; and group as well as individual inter-
ventions promote health and prevent disease. The editors of the major
book about the project acknowledged these similarities, titling their book
A Practice of Social Medicine (Kark and Steuart 1962).
Reecting on the Pholela project a decade after its inception, the rst
medical director, Sidney Kark, commented on the gains made after the
rst year of the experiment:
The whole process of the health centres development was one which reected
an increasing understanding of the individual in terms of his family situation, of
the family in its life situation within the local community and nally the way of
life of the community itself in relation to the social structure of South Africa. By
this detailed study the centre had moved from the plane of vague generalization
about the importance of various social forces to an increasing understanding
of those forces in relation to health and disease as manifested in individuals.
(1951:677)
The signicance of Pholela was that connections between social rela-
tionships and health were made an essential part of daily health center
practice (Ibid.). The staff of the health center used epidemiology, es-
pecially a socially oriented epidemiology, to develop and evaluate the
practice of community-oriented primary health care (COPC). They fo-
cused on social and cultural factors in the growth and development of
children, the social causes of sexually transmitted diseases, nutrition and
health, and evaluation of COPCs effect on health status. It is remarkable
that South Africa, home to one of the worlds most repressive political
regimes in the latter part of the twentieth century, was earlier the site of
the most creative experiment in combining insights of social science and
epidemiology to describe and improve human health.
The biographies of Sidney Kark and of Emily Kark, his wife, help to
explain the origins of the anthropological aspects of their research. As
medical students they were inuenced strongly by their association with
the South African Institute of Race Relations (S. and E. Kark: personal
communication), and in 1934 they began the Society for the Study of
Medical Conditions among the Bantu. In1939 Sidney Kark was selected
by the Ministry of Health to head a new health center in Pholela, a small
rural African community in the province of Natal.
The Pholela Health Center was a pilot project designed to deliver effec-
tive and appropriate health services to rural South African communities.
From its inception the Center was concerned with the social and cultural
life of the surrounding community. The rst activities of the Center in-
cluded meeting with tribal chiefs and elders to discuss the program. The
staff also consulted womens groups, local missionaries, school teachers,
and parents of schoolchildren. The community health educators made
multipurpose home visits to educate the community, learn about local
health beliefs and practices, and identify those people most responsible
for the dissemination of news and new ideas. Health center staff cre-
ated an innovative gardening program, wherein people were given seeds,
taught how to grow new vegetable varieties, and shown how to prepare
a variety of nutritious dishes that conformed with local preferences; in
addition they created a cooperative seed-buying project and community
market. Early clinical work included examining schoolchildren, initiat-
ing a general medical clinic, and establishing a maternal and child health
program. An epidemiological survey was conducted door-to-door to as-
certain the health status of the community. The combination of survey
work and action programs led the teamto develop the concept of commu-
nity health diagnosis, which includes monitoring a communitys health
as well as identifying targets for intervention (Kark and Kark 1981).
The Pholela Health Center was very successful: in 1944 the South
African National Health Services Commission recommended that more
than 40 new health centers throughout South Africa be constructed and
administered according to the Pholela model. The IFCH was created
under S. Karks direction to train staff for the newhealth centers, conduct
research, and practice family and community medicine. The Institute
included seven health centers; the one at Pholela was its rural community
health center, and six new centers were established by the Institute in
and around the city of Durban to serve communities of various incomes
and ethnicities. Each of these centers provided primary health care and
served as a source of information for cross-cultural comparative research
on topics such as child rearing, infant mortality, and menarche.
The Karks continued their training in epidemiology and social science:
in 19471948 they studied epidemiology at John Ryles new Institute of
Social Medicine at Oxford University, and they worked with E. E. Evans-
Pritchard, Meyer Fortes, and Max Gluckman, the primary forgers of
British social anthropology at that time. The Karks analyzed much of their
Pholela data in Gluckmans methodology seminar and in discussions with
Fortes and Evans-Pritchard. In that setting they were able to rene their
ideas about a socially oriented epidemiology (S. and E. Kark: personal
communication).
Though it began optimistically, by the late 1940s the attempt to develop
a South African National Health Service was under siege, and conserva-
tive politics eventually led to its failure. The infamous apartheid policy
began to be assembled in 1948 with the election of a conservative gov-
ernment. Activists and dissenters interested in social equity and social
medicine were harassed by the government over the next few decades,
and many decided to emigrate.
B. The Human Resources and Intellectual Legacy of the IFCH
When the South African government closed the IFCHin 1960, it signaled
an end to its experiment in social medicine. Nevertheless the ensuing
diaspora ensured that the IFCH staff, ideas, and methods would spread
around the globe. A list of IFCH members who emigrated in the 1950s
and early 1960s reads almost like a Whos Who of late-twentieth-century
research and action in social medicine and social epidemiology (see Davey
Smith and Susser 2002, Trostle 1986b).
The Karks emigrated to Israel in 1959, and they were joined there by
other IFCH staff who had been invited to serve in the expanded pro-
gram at Hebrew University. They began work in what soon evolved into
the Department of Social Medicine (later the School of Public Health
and Community Medicine) at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical
School in Jerusalem. The groups ideas on howto incorporate epidemiol-
ogy and social science into the delivery of health services to communities
were presented in texts such as Epidemiology and Community Medicine
(Kark 1974) and The Practice of Community-Oriented Primary Health Care
(Kark 1981). Their ideas about how to make epidemiology a functional
tool of health center practice were included in Survey Methods in Com-
munity Medicine (Abramson and Abramson 1999) and Making Sense of
Data (Abramson and Abramson 2001).
Other South Africans associated with the IFCH went to Uganda and
Kenya, where they founded health programs emphasizing preventive
medicine much as was practiced at the IFCH. Still others came to the
United States to apply their IFCH experiences to work in community
health centers and major universities. For example, Mervyn Susser and
Zena Stein, health center physicians deeply inuenced by their work in
the IFCH in the late 1950s (Oppenheimer and Rosner 2002, Susser
1993), came to the United States via Britain and became central g-
ures in the development of epidemiology and public health in the United
States (Davey Smith and Susser 2002). Susser was editor of the American
Journal of Public Health, co-authored an important text in medical soci-
ology, and wrote many fundamental books and articles on epidemiologic
theory (e.g., Susser 1973, 1987; Susser and Susser 1996). Stein was
a leader in analyzing the relationship between maternal age and birth
defects, as well as an important early proponent of developing methods
women could use to prevent HIV infection (Stein 1985, 1990). The work
of the IFCHalso attracted foreign nationals, two of whomwere important
to the growth of social medicine and social epidemiology in the United
States. Anthropologist Norman Scotch spent 18 months at the IFCHdo-
ing research on the causes of hypertension among the Zulu (e.g., Scotch
1960, 1963b), and soon afterward he wrote one of the rst reviews of
literature in the eld of medical anthropology (Scotch 1963a). Scotch,
who eventually came to direct the School of Public Health at Boston
University, devoted a signicant part of this review to epidemiology. He
asserted that epidemiology at that point was essentially a method that
looked at the combined inuence of biology, environment, society, and
culture on human health. He reviewed the application of epidemiology to
diseases like kuru in New Guinea, psychopathology among the Eskimo,
and hypertension among the Zulu, pointing out the broad attention paid
to social change as a causal factor in all these cases.
H. Jack Geiger did a clerkship at the IFCH when he was a medical
student at Case Western University and later published with Scotch on
social factors inuencing arthritis and hypertension (Scotch and Geiger
1962, 1963). In the United States Geiger became inuential in the social
medicine and community health center movements (e.g., Geiger 1971)
and was a co-founder of major antinuclear and human rights groups
(Physicians for Social Responsibility and, later, Physicians for Human
Rights). Geiger clearly acknowledged his indebtedness to S. Kark and
his colleagues (1984:17). COPC was promoted as a workable goal for
medicine in the United States, and more than 600 federally funded com-
munity health centers existed in the United States at the peak of this
movement in the 1970s (Geiger 1993, Mullan 1982). Two other U.S. ex-
periments in providing health care duplicated many aspects of the IFCH:
the Navajo-Many Farms Project inthe late 1950s (see Adair andDeuschle
1970) and the Tufts-Delta Health Center from 1965 to the present (see
Geiger 1971). Like the IFCH, each of these also was designed to deliver
health care to urban and rural populations, and each also developed in-
novative methods that combined the social sciences with medicine and
epidemiology. COPCalso was successful in many other countries (Susser
1999, Tollman 1994).
The ideas and methods initiated at Pholela and the IFCH thus were
disseminated throughout the world, helping to spawn similar projects in
other areas. Phoelela and the IFCH showed that a combination of epi-
demiologic and social science methods could better understand the extent
of community health problems, direct the focus of curative and preven-
tive measures, and evaluate the effectiveness of these measures. Perhaps
most important from an anthropological point of view, the IFCH expe-
rience taught its staff the importance of gaining cultural understanding
(Kark and Kark 1962). This emphasis can be seen clearly in many of
the projects and publications that resulted after the project halted and its
staff scattered, in particular, in the work of John Cassel.
C. From Practice to Process: Unpacking the Social
and Cultural Environment
For our purposes one of the major ideas to emerge from staff trained
at the IFCH was a conceptual framework for analyzing the social and
cultural processes relevant to health. This framework was developed by
an interdisciplinary team at the University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill, led by John Cassel, a former IFCHphysician/epidemiologist, and the
teamalso included an anthropologist (Donald Patrick) and a psychologist
(David Jenkins).
Cassel was a South African physician who had joined the Pholela
Health Center in 1948. The importance of the Pholela experience to
Cassels later work cannot be overestimated. His close contact with the
health problems of the Pholela community, and the fact that his own at-
tempts at curative and preventive care sometimes met competition from
traditional medical beliefs and practices, helped him to develop an inter-
est in the social and cultural components of health. This interest is stated
most clearly in anthropological terms in a chapter titled Cultural Factors
in the Interpretation of Illness: A Case Study (Cassell 1962). This case
study is presented as an illustration of the insight provided by knowledge
of the cultural patterning and social situation into behavior which would
otherwise appear as a series of inexplicable unrelated acts (1962:238).
It describes how two related kin groups in Pholela managed cases of pul-
monary tuberculosis, cervical cancer, and persistent headaches, and it
shows how knowledge of a series of related witchcraft accusations helped
explain the management strategies chosen by kin groups and a missionary
who became involved in the case.
Cassel also described the importance of cultural understanding in the
Pholela project in his lead chapter in Benjamin Pauls classic 1955 text,
Health, Culture, and Community. There he analyzed the different levels of
Zulu resistance to the Pholela staffs curative and preventive efforts. At-
tempts by the staff to change attitudes towardfood; to increase production
and consumption of vegetables, eggs, and milk; to treat pulmonary
tuberculosis; or to combat soil erosion each was met by a higher level of
resistance. The male labor out-migration created by South African labor
regulations brought syphilis and tuberculosis into the community and
challenged long-term treatment regimes for working-age males. Local
unemployment and population pressure, combined with traditional food
preferences and land use patterns better adapted to another time and
place, helped make soil erosion a serious problem and malnutrition a
common diagnosis (Cassel 1955:35). Understanding which cultural pat-
terns were easiest to modify allowed the workers at Pholela to target their
efforts toward reasonable goals; knowing who held power in the com-
munity allowed them to focus their actions on potential change-agents.
Measurable health improvements were seen throughout the course of the
project, especially in infant mortality, incidence of infectious diseases,
and prevalence of malnutrition.
Cassel left South Africa in 1954 to join the School of Public Health
at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. There he
developed a strong joint faculty in the social sciences and epidemiology.
Researchers in North Carolina confronted a largely agricultural state in
the process of developing a postwar industrial base. The impact of so-
ciety and culture on health was not as dramatic or life-threatening there
as it had been in Pholela. Nonetheless, the studies undertaken by Cassel
and colleagues in North Carolina eventually showed the equally signi-
cant health effects of such diffuse social processes as social and cultural
change and adaptation. Cassels conceptualization (1976) of the effects of
the social environment on host resistance is his classic work; one mea-
sure of its importance is that it has been cited more than 800 times since
publication.
The interdisciplinary team Cassel led at UNC-Chapel Hill published
one of the rst papers in social epidemiology to separate explicitly
the social system from the cultural system. Acknowledging the work of
the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, the authors dened culture as the
fabric of meaning in terms of which people interpret their experience
and guide their action, while they dened social structure (which they
equated with society) as the way that group life is ordered, the persistent
and regular social relationships of people (Cassel et al. 1960:945). These
distinctions were used to differentiate between the appropriateness of cul-
tural norms and three different forms of social organization within which
norms applied: occupation, family, and social class. Specic hypotheses
could be tested within each of these three arenas. This paper showed the
growing theoretical sophistication of researchers in social epidemiology.
With the increasing general acceptance of the etiological importance of
the social and cultural environment, it became necessary to develop the-
oretical models that could account for the obvious complexity of this
environment.
In 1960, Cassels team proposed an epidemiological study of the
changes in health status that might accompany changes from a rural agri-
cultural to an industrial way of life. Designed to take place in a manufac-
turing plant in a small Appalachian town, the study would compare three
groups of people: agricultural workers, rst-generation factory employ-
ees, and second- and third-generation factory employees. The authors
hypothesized that the rst-generation workers, those experiencing the
greatest cultural change, would have poorer health status than the other
groups. They also hypothesized that less family solidarity and greater
incongruity between cultural background and current social situation
would be most closely associated with poor health and adjustment. The
research conrmed many of their hypotheses (Cassel and Tyroler 1961).
Using measures of general morbidity and of absenteeism due to illness,
the results showed that the health status of the rst factory workers to
move into the industrial area was lower than the health status of factory
workers whose relatives already had been employed in the factory.
Under Cassels inuence, two other research topics linked epidemiol-
ogists and anthropologists at UNC-Chapel Hill: the epidemiologic study
of diseases not recognized by biomedicine and the protective effects of
social support on health. The medical anthropologist Arthur Rubel used
his training in epidemiology at UNC-Chapel Hill to develop studies of
the Mexican folk illness susto (Rubel 1964). This was one of the rst times
that the methods of epidemiology were applied to disease entities dened
according to non-Western categories in an effort to understand their dis-
tribution and cause, even if they did not t biomedical assumptions.
The second theme was a series of studies that established the pro-
tective health effects of social support, such as marital ties, friendships,
and membership in community organizations. This work from the early
1970s helped to demonstrate the importance of host susceptibility and
resistance that is, factors that either increase or decrease the likelihood
that an individual will become ill. Social support subsequently became a
popular focus for studies in social epidemiology (Berkman and Kawachi
2000, Berkman and Syme 1979), but the anthropological origin of epi-
demiological interest in social support has largely been forgotten.
The UNC-Chapel Hill research has had a profound impact on social
epidemiology. If the South African contribution is typied broadly as
understanding how to provide and measure the benets of health care
to communities, the UNC-Chapel Hill work might be typied as devel-
oping epidemiological strategies to measure the health effects of social
and cultural change. The new social medicine practiced in South Africa
had its roots rmly (and knowingly) planted in a nineteenth-century so-
ciological epidemiology; the UNC-Chapel Hill research on the effects
of social and cultural change had an unacknowledged afnity with this
same nineteenth-century work. For example, Rudolf Virchow wrote that
epidemic diseases were markers of cultural change. While considering
the contemporary epidemics of the industrial world cancer, heart dis-
ease, stroke, other chronic diseases, accidents Virchows words maintain
their signicance: The history of articial epidemics is therefore the his-
tory of disturbances which the culture of mankind has experienced. Its
changes showus with powerful strokes the turning points at which culture
moves off in newdirections (Virchow, Report on the Typhus Epidemic in
Upper Silesia, quoted in Rosen 1947:681).
D. Redening the Social Environment through Medical Ecology
I have paid specic attention to the research developed by Cassel and
colleagues because of its relevance to contemporary social epidemiology
and because of its links to the IFCHand South Africa. But by highlighting
the research produced by specic people, I risk ignoring the broader
intellectual surroundings that nourish such work. One critical part of this
context consists of the ongoing attempts made in the twentieth century to
dene and understand the etiologic inuence of the social environment.
The collaborative work between anthropologists and epidemiologists
that began in the late 1950s came at a time of redenition in epidemiology:
articles at the time stated the eld of epidemiology was returning in
large measure to the physicochemical and sociological orientation of the
rst half of the 19th century, but on a much sounder scientic basis
than was possible at that time (Terris 1962:1375). A number of epi-
demiology textbooks in the late 1950s dened epidemiology as applying
to any and all diseases, infectious or chronic, and also stated the im-
portance of the social environment as a factor in disease. Early litera-
ture reviews in the developing eld of medical anthropology also started
to discuss epidemiology at about this time (see Caudill 1953, Polgar
1962, and Scotch 1963a). Explicitly and consciously, the two elds were
converging.
In 1958 the rst paper was published stating explicitly that the disci-
plines of anthropology and epidemiology had noteworthy parallels (Fleck
and Ianni 1958). Perhaps because it appeared in a journal of applied an-
thropology, the paper provoked little comment by epidemiologists (Fleck:
personal communication; Ianni: personal communication). It empha-
sized the social aspects of the research by Panum, Snow, and other
nineteenth-century epidemiologists and also discussed the difculties of
modern-day collaboration between anthropologists and epidemiologists.
One primary difculty was that anthropologists working in applied so-
ciomedical research were commonly included only as consultants: they
had little control over the nature of the questions being asked and learned
little about epidemiology. Another problem was that epidemiologists his-
torically had been too concerned with disease agents: these authors had
high hopes for what they called an emerging neoecological approach in
epidemiology, which would place greater emphasis on multiple causality
and the importance of the environment. They also emphasized the impor-
tance of disease classication to epidemiology by remarking that [t]he
epidemiologist must be and is a social anthropologist with his particular
interest being nosology (1958:39).
Fleck and Ianni were correct in their estimates of the power of the
emerging ecological approach in epidemiology, although their hopes for
signicant increases in anthropological engagement in this work would
not be realized for two decades. Medical ecology was dened in the 1950s
as an analytical perspective that focused on the study of the popula-
tions of man with special reference to environment and to populations
of all other organisms as they affect his health and his numbers (Audy
1958:102). This interest had grown rapidly during World War II, when
geographers mapped disease distributions and ecological habitats as part
of the battles fought against tropical diseases in South East Asia. A well-
known medical geographer once proposed that the termmedical geogra-
phy be replaced with the words human ecology of health and disease
(May 1978 [1952]:212). But medical geography emphasizes the spa-
tial aspects of disease distribution, whereas medical ecology stresses the
organizational aspects of disease distribution. In contrast to a medical
geographers questions about place and time, a medical ecologist might
investigate the manifestations of a disease at different ecological levels
cellular, individual, community, or population and would consider the
interactions among these levels.
One important result of the exchanges among medical ecology, medical
geography, and epidemiology in the 1950s was that researchers were given
further theoretical justications for including the social environment in
the study of the distribution and determinants of diseases. One researcher
wrote that the notable addition to the content of epidemiology under
the inuence of ecology is in relation to the social environment (Gordon
1958:351). A1960 text titled Human Ecology and Health expressed similar
ideas:
Public health has always been concerned with man and his environment and, in
this sense, oriented toward human ecology though in a somewhat limited fashion
at rst. Today, however, the signicance and the meaning of the term environment
have acquired new proportions. Environment in this sense includes, of course,
not only the material and spatial aspects of mans world but the nonmaterial web
of human social relations called culture which profoundly inuences mans state.
(Rogers 1960:vii, emphasis in the original)
This emerging interest in ecology and health had two outcomes rele-
vant to our theme. First, anthropologists began to be used to gain entr ee
into the eld. In 1965, for example, members from the disciplines of epi-
demiology, social anthropology, entomology, sanitary engineering, public
health nursing, and laboratory science embarked on an ambitious inter-
national comparative research project at the Geographical Epidemiology
Unit at The Johns Hopkins University, designed to study the ecology
of disease in ve developing countries. The project team eventually pub-
lished studies fromPeru, Chad, and Afghanistan (Buck et al. 1968, 1970,
1972). The role of the social anthropologist in these studies was to collect
contextual socioeconomic and cultural data and to facilitate the accep-
tance of the project within each study area. A cross-culturally applicable
interview schedule was designed and translated into the respective na-
tional languages. Key informants were interviewed to obtain information
about the different villages and cultures. But despite mention of the type
and schedule of agricultural work, recency of settlement, frequency of
out-migration and in-migration, and rapidity of social change, few sys-
tematic attempts are made in these three works to link the social and
cultural environment with the descriptive epidemiology of tropical dis-
eases. The social and cultural information serves as context, but the re-
search was undertaken more to describe this context than to analyze its
relationship to human health and disease.
E. The Social Environment and Mental Health
Although psychological studies are not a primary focus of this chapter, it
is important to mention that the mental health effects of social and cul-
tural disorganization were being studied in the 1950s and 1960s along-
side studies of the physical health effects of culture change. Perhaps the
most important group engaged in the study of social disorganization and
mental health at that time was formed by psychiatrists, anthropologists,
and epidemiologists associated primarily with Cornell University. The
group included a large number of senior anthropologists, including Marc-
Adelard Tremblay, Charles Hughes, Norman Chance, Jane Hughes,
and Robert Rapoport. The project directors (Alexander and Dorothea
Leighton) were psychiatrists who held joint appointments in the Depart-
ment of Anthropology. The rst stages of the project involved more than
12 years of community eldwork in an area of Nova Scotia they called
Stirling County. They determined the prevalence of psychiatric dysfunc-
tion by having clinicians interview residents, and they compared this
prevalence across the communities when arrayed along a spectrum of so-
cial disintegration. In all, 33 people participated in anthropological work
over the rst 10 years of the project (Hughes et al. 1960:531), and the
project continues to this day (see Murphy 1994b, Murphy et al. 2000).
The authors described anthropological data collection as part of a to-
tal approach to the County and its communities (Hughes et al. 1960:7).
Anthropological data would help readers understand epidemiological
ndings, as they put it, so that as rich a background as possible is pro-
vided for understanding the context of the varying tendencies with regard
to both prevalence and type of symptom pattern (Ibid.:8). In a tradition
that we have seen extending back to Peter Panumalmost 100 years before,
the authors were involved as participant observers:
[M]embers of our teamhave variously lived as neighbors, have grown gardens, cut
timber from their own woodlots, shed on the bays, hauled lobsters, held ofces
in societies, taught nursery school, participated in the weddings, christenings, and
funerals of friends and in turn had these friends share with us our own joys in new
marriage and the birth of babies, and our sadnesses and fear when confronting
sickness and death. (Ibid.:7)
Given our reference to Rudolf Virchow as a key nineteenth-century
gure in the history of anthropology and epidemiology, it is important
to note that one volume of the Stirling County report (The Character of
Danger: Psychiatric Symptoms in Selected Communities, 1963) is dedicated
to Virchows memory, and its title is extracted from his writing on how to
differentiate pathological from normal physiological processes. Virchow
wrote that pathological processes are hard to distinguish from ordinary
life processes, even consisting, at times, of ordinary processes happening
at the wrong time or place. The Leightons and their colleagues thought
that psychiatric disturbances were similarly difcult to dene through
sites of brain lesions or psychodynamic theories about how the mind
functioned, so they used Virchows approach to malfunction to justify
assessing psychiatric status based on the type, frequency, and duration
of impairment posed by psychiatric symptoms (Leighton and Murphy
1997).
This project, and similar population-based studies of mental function-
ing, created an early precedent for the contemporary interest of epidemi-
ologists in human communities and their effects on health. As noted
earlier, they realized the importance of establishing close and enduring
relationships with communities under study, much as any anthropological
participant observer would. They also clearly described the need for col-
laborative work between anthropologists and epidemiologists.
The Leightons studies of mental illness and the UNC-Chapel Hill
studies of physical illness started in the 1950s, when anthropologists were
becoming interested in the concepts of acculturation (Beals 1953) and
culture change (Lange 1965). However, while theories about the nature
and effects of social and cultural change became increasingly useful in so-
cial epidemiology (Cassel 1964) and psychiatric epidemiology (Leighton
et al. 1963), the applied epidemiological studies that explored the health
consequences of such change had little impact on further theorizing in
anthropology until the 1990s (see Chapter 3).
III. Continuity and Change in Twenty-First-Century
Projects Integrating Anthropology and Epidemiology
Before thinking about the newissues facing anthropologists and epidemi-
ologists at the beginning of the twenty-rst century, it is important to re-
call the contemporary themes that already have received decades of atten-
tion. For example, the interdisciplinary exchanges between these elds
four and ve decades ago were based partly on the movement of epi-
demiologists from home to foreign terrain. Anthropology became more
relevant and necessary when epidemiologists started working more often
in cultural contexts they did not understand. This theme is still relevant
today, although the uncharted terrain now includes a mixture of foreign
territories and domestic communities. As epidemiologists have become
increasingly involved in the design and implementation of intervention
trials attempting to change human behaviors such as unsafe sex, smok-
ing, and high alcohol consumption, their need and desire to understand
communities and human behaviors has grown correspondingly (Smedley
and Syme 2000).
The growth of an integrated approach joining anthropology and epi-
demiology also rests on disciplinary responses to social and cultural
change. Increased migration and urbanization make it important to de-
ne and measure the health effects of these social and cultural processes;
a mixture of epidemiological and other social science theory and method
is required for this purpose. We human beings are modifying our eco-
logical context through the rapid transport systems we invent, the forests
we cut down, and the new medicines and poisons we produce. Familiar
diseases such as hypertension and diabetes are spreading more gener-
ally across the planet, helped along by changing dietary preferences and
levels of physical activity. War, violence, political repression, and inad-
equate services shift people into new areas, bringing new customs, new
Twenty-First-Century Projects 39
diseases, and new epidemiologic patterns. Good eldwork continues to
be important to understanding this changing context because it puts re-
searchers in direct contact with what they otherwise have to imagine (Agar
1996).
Studies of how the changing social and cultural environment affects
human health will continue to be of critical importance for the foresee-
able future. No single discipline can develop the complex models needed
to account for the interplay between the individual and the environment
and the rise of diseases such as AIDS, SARS, E. coli O157-H7, and
antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis. As we will see in Chapter 6, interdisci-
plinary collaboration to treat and prevent these diseases is just as critical
as the collaborative work undertaken to understand their burden and
their causes.
Some of the forces that will continue to facilitate exchanges between
anthropologists and epidemiologists in the twenty-rst century are re-
lated to the growth of disciplinary research tools and knowledge not all
that dissimilar from that of a century ago. For example, innovative ad-
ministrative procedures in the nineteenth century helped create health
insurance schemes, national health care, and systems of vital statistics.
Administrative processes today help enroll or trace study participants or
maintain consistent procedures across multiple study sites; these make it
easier to use complex research designs and to increase the volume of re-
search containing both biological and sociocultural variables. These pro-
cedures also facilitate looking at patient enrollment or nonparticipation
in research studies as sociocultural processes relevant to epidemiologic
research.
Newtechnologies that facilitate the processing of large amounts of data
will obviously continue to push interdisciplinary or integrated research
studies. Statistical procedures such as path analysis and nonlinear re-
gression make analyses of multivariate relationships more feasible. This
allows researchers to examine multicausal models of disease causation
that include social as well as biological factors. Ever-faster computers,
cheaper massive data storage, and more complex computer-based statis-
tical packages support the newanalytic techniques critical to todays social
and cultural epidemiologic research. Combining geographic information
systems and statistical procedures for modeling and graphing social net-
works makes new studies of human interaction and disease transmission
possible.
Technologies make information easier to process, but they also help
make things visible. As stated earlier in this chapter, techniques of imag-
ing such as stethoscopes, microscopes, and tissue staining helped to create
newdisease categories and scientic disciplines in the nineteenth century.
Twenty-rst-century technologies for seeing inside human bodies, testing
for genetic anomalies, and decoding the human genome are creating sim-
ilar opportunities for joint anthropological and epidemiological research.
These technologies help change denitions of disease and disorder even
as they also modify how humans are grouped into healthy, diseased,
and at risk categories.
Increased recognition of mutual interests between anthropologists and
epidemiologists will continue to promote more frequent collaboration
and more closely integrated studies and programs. Both disciplines ac-
tively debate critical issues such as the sources of their theories, validity
of their methods, and utility of their ndings. Medical anthropology has
come to use a broad range of qualitative and quantitative research tech-
niques to describe illness in biological and cultural contexts (Dunn and
Janes 1986). Cultural anthropologists have assessed the use of statistics
in anthropology and have written about the differences between ethno-
graphic and statistical representation (Asad 1994). In similar fashion,
epidemiology has subelds open to collaboration with anthropologists,
and epidemiologists have expressed interest in qualitative methods and
interpretive modes of inquiry (e.g., Almeida Filho 1992, B ehague et al.
2002, Black 1994, Breilh 1994, Donovan et al. 2002).
Some new big questions prompt discipline-based critiques within and
across anthropology and epidemiology. In Chapter 1, I presented a de-
scription of cultural epidemiology as a eld of study concerned with how
diseases are dened and measured as well as patterned. The type of in-
tense reexivity seen in anthropology also has been articulated by some
epidemiologists in the past decade. They have started to ask explicit ques-
tions about whether their paradigms of disease causation might best be
labeled as causal webs (Krieger 1994), black boxes of unknown com-
plexity, or Chinese boxes of nested levels of organization (Schwartz
et al. 1999, Susser and Susser 1996).
Anthropologists are asking questions about the epidemiological vocab-
ulary and method that mark some departures fromthe past. For example,
only in the past few decades have they asked what the meaning of race
is when used as an explanatory variable in studies of human health and
through what causal pathways it might inuence human health. They
are giving similar critical attention to words such as stress, lifestyle,
risk, socioeconomic status, and community. They are asking how
best to measure the mental health problems of diverse groups in the
United States (Guarnaccia and Rogler 1999) and internationally (Weiss
2001), and how feminist perspectives can inform epidemiology (Inhorn
and Whittle 2001). The following chapter takes a more detailed look at
these kinds of questions.
Understanding how human bodies react to the presence, status, and
power of others is another theme now receiving integrated attention.
Studies of the inuence of social support on human health have been
joined by studies of the effects of social networks on human physiology
and health. One critical question is how the environment and disease
burden of the surrounding population inuence individual disease risk.
Strong evidence that poverty is a cause of sickness and mortality is being
buttressed by evidence that the widening gap between rich and poor is
itself a major cause of poor health and death (Farmer 2003, Kawachi
et al. 1999, Nguyen and Peschard 2003). This is of particular interest to
anthropologists because both pathogens and ideas about pathogens are
transmitted through populations. The tools and theories to understand
these phenomena must be able to move between the intracellular and the
interpersonal, tracing causal relationships among pathogens, behavior,
power, and disease.
FOR FURTHER READING
Ackerknecht E. H. 1953. Rudolf Virchow: Doctor, Statesman, Anthropologist.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Cohen M. N. 1989. Health and the Rise of Civilization. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Hahn R. A. 1995. Anthropology and Epidemiology: One Logic or Two? In
Sickness and Healing: An Anthropological Perspective. Pp. 99128. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press.
Krieger N. 2001. Theories for social epidemiology in the 21st century: an ecoso-
cial perspective. International Journal of Epidemiology 30:668677.
Kunitz S. J. 1994. Disease and Social Diversity: The European Impact on the Health
of Non-Europeans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lindenbaum S. 2001. Kuru, Prions, and human affairs: thinking about epi-
demics. Annual Review of Anthropology 30:363385.
Porter R. 1997. The Greatest Benet to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity.
New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
Rosen G. 1958. A History of Public Health. New York: MD Publications.
Trostle J. A. 1986a. Anthropology and Epidemiology in the Twentieth Century:
A Selective History of Collaborative Projects and Theoretical Afnities, 1920
to 1970. In Anthropology and Epidemiology: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the
Study of Health and Disease. C. R. Janes, R. Stall, and S. Gifford, eds.
Pp. 5994. Dordrecht: Reidel.
.1986b. Early Work in Anthropology and Epidemiology: From Social
Medicine to the GermTheory, 1840 to 1920. In Anthropology and Epidemiology:
Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Health and Disease. C. R. Janes,
R. Stall, and S. Gifford, eds. Pp. 2557. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Trostle J. and J. Sommerfeld. 1996. Medical anthropology and epidemiology.
Annual Review of Anthropology 25:253274.
P1: Kad
3 Disease Patterns and Assumptions:
Unpacking Variables
Dr. Donald M. Berwick, a Boston pediatrician, said recently, Tell me
someones race. Tell me their income. And tell me whether they smoke.
The answers to those three questions will tell me more about their
longevity and health status than any other questions I could possibly
ask.
(Kilborn 1998:A16)
Dime c omo mueres y te dir e qui en eres.
(Tell me how you die and I will tell you who you are.)
(Paz 1993:59)
A pediatrician predicts health status and lifespan from aspects of North
American social status and identity; a writer divines identity from man-
ner of death. These opposite positions are actually based on the same
premise: that selfhood and mortality are intertwined. Both claims rest
on the assumption that there are systematic connections between how
people live and how they die.
Of course, any pattern of relationships between causes and outcomes
is based on an underlying set of assumptions, because assumptions drive
the choice of measures that allow the pattern to become visible. The
choice of what variables to measure both directs and connes attention.
As one researcher put it, We will consistently fail to observe what we
do not seek to nd (Burrage 1987). This chapter explores how different
health-related disciplines dene and employ a few key concepts: person,
place, and time.
I. The Origins and Meanings of
Disease-Pattern Categories
It is an epidemiological axiom that data can be reported according to
categories labeled person, place, and time. A popular text from the 1980s,
Lilienfeld and Lilienfelds Foundations of Epidemiology, begins this way:
Epidemiology is concerned with the patterns of disease occurrence in
42
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Origins and Meanings of Disease-Pattern Categories 43
human populations and the factors that inuence these patterns. The
epidemiologist is primarily interested in the occurrence of disease by
time, place, and persons (1980:3).
What characteristics do scientists identify as falling within these cate-
gories, and what do they leave out? Some of the common variables that
epidemiologists think of as belonging to the category person include age,
sex, marital status, race, socioeconomic status, religion, and occupation.
But each of these variables potentially represents multiple underlying
processes. A variable such as age, for example, represents a biological
process of growth and development as well as a social process of chang-
ing recognition of status and responsibility. A variable such as religion
represents a set of conditions (presence of faith itself, behaviors dictated
by church doctrine, access to social support, ability to attend services)
as well as a routinely collected marker of social status. Without explicit
theories linking underlying processes to measured causal variables, the
categories are meaningless, and studies linking them to health outcomes
are difcult to understand and compare.
Similar complexities exist within other categories of disease patterns.
When researchers describe disease risk associated with place they include
social or political boundaries such as neighborhood, state, region, and
nation, but they also intentionally or not include geological or other
physical environmental inuences such as altitude, level of sunlight, uo-
ride or arsenic content in water, or particulate or carbon monoxide
content in air. The social environment also can manifest itself spatially,
as in population density and urban/rural lifestyle differences or in those
place-based effects of social stratication such as quality of police, re,
schooling, or medical services. Other variables related to place could
include aspects of the biological environment (presence of mosquitoes,
spores, or toxic plants). Once again, some of these variables represent
specic biological exposures (air quality, radiation, micronutrient levels
in local food), whereas others cover more complex interrelated inu-
ences (mobility, job availability, and the quality of schools and medical
services).
The category of time also covers a wide set of processes. Calendar time
measured as days, years, or other periods plays its own role in disease
distribution, measured through variables such as the time between mo-
ment of exposure and appearance of symptoms, or duration of infectivity,
or age at onset, or life expectancy after onset. But the cultural practice
of dividing time into weekdays versus weekends itself inuences disease,
since the meaning of these time periods structures activities like drinking,
sexual activity, recreation, and work. Time can be a marker of biologi-
cal inuence: for example, in the seasonality of disease uctuations due
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44 Disease Patterns and Assumptions
to underlying variations in number of mosquitoes (for malaria or yellow
fever), ticks (for plague or Lyme disease), or infected raccoons (for ra-
bies). Time also enters studies through so-called cohort effects, where
people born during a certain period or of a certain age have similarly
patterned illnesses. And time as history also inuences health research,
both through changes in diagnosis or terminology and through changing
patterns of behavior (popularity of smoking, age at rst sexual expe-
rience) or even the changing signicance of specic life-cycle achieve-
ments. For example, getting married or obtaining a high school degree
elevated the status of young adults more in the 1950s than it did in the
1990s.
The categories of person, place, and time sometimes overlap. Migra-
tion is perhaps the best example because it involves persons changing
places over time. Studies of migrants have had particular force in the at-
tempt to discover the causes of obesity, hypertension, and coronary heart
disease. For example, comparing populations of Japanese men in Japan
with Japanese men in Hawaii and California allowed researchers to hold
genetic variability constant while looking at the effects of changing diet
and other aspects of acculturation (Marmot and Syme 1976). In simi-
lar fashion, Janes (1990) was able to see the health effects of migration
among Samoan migrants to California.
A. Mixing Person, Place, and Time: Modernization, Cultural
Consonance, and Blood Pressure
What processes actually change as social conditions change or as people
move to places where they encounter new conditions? Some possibili-
ties include accumulation of goods, wage labor instead of subsistence
labor, more time in formal education, loss of so-called traditional values
and communal knowledge, changing diets and levels of physical activity,
and acquisition of new norms and values. Studies by John Cassel and
others proposed that changes in social conditions (urbanization, eco-
nomic development, migration) led to greater stress and higher blood
pressure.
Anthropologists and epidemiologists have investigated the health ef-
fects of such processes in numerous sites around the world, paying par-
ticular attention to migrants because they can be compared with those
who stay at home (a baseline population) and because migrants usu-
ally change their behaviors and values as part of their adaptation to new
sites. These studies show that the average blood pressure in the popula-
tion tends to increase with modernization. These differences persist even
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Origins and Meanings of Disease-Pattern Categories 45
when age and obesity are taken into account; they also tend to be larger
among males than among females.
In attempting to understand discrepancies in hypertension rates be-
tween groups in complex, industrialized societies, anthropologist William
Dressler and colleagues use the concept of intracultural diversity to em-
phasize that not all people who share a culture attach the same meanings
to events or conditions (Dressler et al. 1996). What looks like a golden
opportunity to one person might look like unseemly self-promotion to an-
other, and the attributes and trappings of success also vary from person
to person. Dressler argues that the existence and perception of strati-
cation can have measurable health consequences; much of his work uses
hypertension as a proxy measure of overall health.
Dressler is following some of the connections between social strat-
ication and health that have been explored by the social epidemiol-
ogist Richard Wilkinson (1996) and others (Davey-Smith et al. 1990,
Kawachi et al. 1997, Marmot et al. 1991). For example, Wilkinson ar-
gues that relative poverty, the size of the gap between rich and poor, not
absolute poverty, is what best predicts high mortality and reduced life
expectancy in industrialized countries. Unlike Wilkinson, Dressler ex-
plores what he calls lifestyle incongruity: the health-reducing effects of
attempting to maintain an unaffordable lifestyle (Dressler 1999). The ip
side of lifestyle incongruity, called cultural consonance in lifestyle,
measures the extent to which individuals are able to live in accordance
with locally dened material standards.
In a series of studies of rural-to-urban migrants in Brazil, Dressler
and colleagues rst established which components of a material lifestyle
were locally dened as most important, then whether people were able
to achieve those ideals (1996). They found that blood pressure declined
systematically as cultural consonance in lifestyle increased. They have
also showed that the negative effects of lifestyle incongruity can be
mitigated by strong social networks. Blood pressure is consistently lower
across societies among individuals who enjoy good social support, even
though the types of avoidance and coping strategies people use to deal
with social and psychological pressures vary fromplace to place (Dressler
et al. 1997). They posit that the t between lived experience and perceived
community standards has direct and indirect benecial effects on blood
pressure.
Dresslers paradigm offers an alternative response to those eager to see
anthropologists map cultural groupings for epidemiologic purposes. Even
if the boundaries of cultural areas cannot be dened with any precision, it
is still possible to include these types of cultural consonance measures
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to determine who in a group holds shared values. This information can
then be used to dene group membership along the lines of present status,
belief, or practice rather than residence within a zone of presumed like-
minded souls.
B. Connecting Person, Place, and Time: Disease Clusters
Epidemiologists must sometimes investigate whether the appearance of
disease among a group of people in a delimited space at a particular time
represents levels of disease greater than expected. One famous contem-
porary disease cluster is the child leukemia cases found in one neigh-
borhood in Woburn, Massachusetts, popularized in the 1995 book and
subsequent lm called A Civil Action. Another is the illnesses and deaths
in 1976 among a group of American Legion war veterans meeting at a
hotel in Philadelphia, which gave rise to the name Legionnaires Dis-
ease. Clustering of disease in one place is often thought by the public
to indicate an infectious or environmental cause (air or water pollution,
radioactivity, or energy from high-tension power lines), but epidemiol-
ogists and biostatisticians recognize that some disease clustering can be
expected to occur just by chance, with no underlying common cause
(Schinazi 2000). Clusters are not always easy to identify. For example,
the movement of people into and out of areas creates complex and con-
fusing exposure dynamics: a group of residents at any one time may in-
clude a few recent arrivals with only brief exposure to local environmen-
tal risks, and it will exclude those with long exposure who have already
moved.
Disease clusters offer another opportunity to see the interplay among
person, place, and time. Yet the very concept of a cluster depends
partly on a series of political and social conventions. The way that
boundaries are drawn around administrative space can determine the
denominator. For example, six cases of childhood leukemia counted
within a residential block looks more like a cluster than six cases in a
census tract or town. These conventions also affect which diseases are
thought to be rare, based, for example, on individuals or governments
deliberately misleading people about disease status. Social interactions
may inuence whether knowledge of common diseases is shared in the
rst place (illness reported within members of a church or students in
a school versus illness unknown because it occurs among isolated or
marginalized individuals). Finally, political and social conventions in-
uence the period of time over which a cluster is studied, as well as
the duration and intensity of data collection. For example, when the
SARS (Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome) epidemic was identied in
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Assumptions about Dening and Measuring Variables 47
early 2003, Toronto ofcials reported cases accurately but lobbied hard
against World Health Organization (WHO) travel warnings imposed on
their city, while Chinese authorities suffered devastating consequences
for a much longer period of time as a result of lapses in surveillance
and their unwillingness to report cases candidly to international health
agencies.
II. Assumptions about Dening and Measuring Variables
I have described two different levels of categorization of variables in the
last few paragraphs. Person, place, and time represent very large group-
ings of variables, whereas concepts such as religion, altitude, or season
are more specic. But another aspect of measurement is also signi-
cant, namely, the specic question or measure used to collect information
about a given variable called the operationalization of that variable. Con-
sider, for example, how to measure the impact of religion on health
status. Lets imagine a hypothetical experiment to assess the effects of
religiosity on health. We might want to compare the health of people
who pray with those who do not or the health of people who are prayed
for with those who are not. (For a wonderful example of a test of this
theory, see an 1872 paper by the statistician Francis Galton titled A sta-
tistical inquiry into the efcacy of prayer.) The investigator in this case
would want to measure the frequency and duration of prayer. But would
the results necessarily be valid? Perhaps the association between health
status and religiosity could be equally well assessed not by the quan-
tity of prayer but by particular health-enhancing behaviors associated
with religious practitioners. Seventh Day Adventists, for example, who
do not eat meat, smoke, or drink alcohol might be healthier than their
nonreligious counterparts regardless of their prayer habits. Should re-
ligiosity be measured by prayer, behavior, church attendance, or some
other characteristic? Each measure might yield different conclusions
about the effect of religion on health (Levin 1996).
The term auxiliary measurement theories has been developed to la-
bel links between theory-based concepts and the indicators used to mea-
sure them (Blalock 1968). Auxiliary measurement theories accompany
the denitions, assumptions, and propositions that are contained in
general theories being tested in any research study (Blalock 1990:24).
For example, measuring religiosity through prayer rather than church at-
tendance involves an auxiliary measurement theory that links religiosity to
performance of faith rather than physical presence and network develop-
ment in a house of worship. Unlike measuring whether there is an associa-
tion between religiosity and health, assessing whether church attendance
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is the best measure of religiosity cannot be tested in a study. These aux-
iliary theories guide the selection of specic variables and measures that
are said to represent the underlying theory. Because they justify and guide
the selection of measures, auxiliary measurement theories are an essen-
tial part of any quantitative study design, although they usually receive
little scrutiny. As I will show in the remainder of this chapter, one mean-
ingful way anthropologists and epidemiologists collaborate is through
unpacking the auxiliary measurement theories and the unexamined
social and cultural components of common epidemiologic variables. In
the following examples, I will begin to illustrate this process by unpacking
the categories of person, place, and time.
III. Aspects of the Category Person
Many different population attributes are categorized under the cate-
gory person. The most obvious of these are age and sex, both associated
with a wide range of illnesses. Other components of human existence
classied under the category person include aspects of social position
(occupation, wealth, education), human behaviors that increase or re-
duce health, and physical attributes relevant to health status (nutritional
status, height and weight, blood pressure). More recently, social epidemi-
ologists have developed population attributes that cannot be reduced to
individual characteristics: these include extent of income inequality in an
entire group or systematic differences between individual aspirations and
the resources available to achieve them. The following sections explore
a few of the variables categorized under the category person, highlight-
ing areas and studies where anthropology and epidemiology make joint
contributions.
A. Status, Sex, Age, and Accident Mortality
During an epidemiology course for medical students at the University of
California at San Francisco in the early 1980s, Professor Virginia Ernster
presented the class with a set of mortality data from what she described
merely as an unusual event. In a task reminiscent of the quote from
Octavio Paz at the beginning of this chapter, the assignment was to use
the distribution of the attributes of those who survived and died to guess
what the event was.
The tables in this chapter summarize those mortality data froma num-
ber of perspectives. Tables 3.1 and 3.2 show that males died in larger
proportion than females, those of low or other social status died in
larger proportion than those of higher status, and adults died in larger
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Aspects of the Category Person 49
Table 3.1. Mortality by economic status and sex
Population Exposed Deaths per 100
to Risk Number of Deaths Exposed to Risk
Economic
Status Male Female Both Male Female Both Male Female Both
I (high) 180 145 325 118 4 122 65 3 37
II 179 106 285 154 13 167 87 12 59
III 510 196 706 422 106 528 83 54 73
Other 862 23 885 670 3 673 78 13 76
Total 1731 470 2201 1364 126 1490 80 27 67
Source: Dawson 1995.
Table 3.2. Mortality by economic status and age
Population Exposed Deaths per 100
to Risk Number of Deaths Exposed to Risk
Economic
Status Adult Child Both Adult Child Both Adult Child Both
I (high) 319 6 325 122 0 122 38 0 37
II 261 24 285 167 0 167 64 0 59
III 627 79 706 476 52 528 76 66 73
Other 885 0 885 673 0 673 76 76
Total 2092 109 2201 1438 52 1490 69 48 67
Source: Dawson 1995.
proportion than children. Social and cultural hierarchies apparently
seemed to preserve high class over low, and females and children over
males and adults. Tables 3.3 and 3.4 show us the joint effects of social
and cultural hierarchies on survival.
Data from Table 3.1 and 3.2 are summarized so that the proportion
surviving within each subgroup is represented. Data from Tables 3.1 and
3.2 are summarized in Tables 3.3 and 3.4 so that the differential survival
effects of the three major variables (economic status, age, and gender)
are separated out. Comparing Tables 3.3 and 3.4 shows that survival
(1) decreases as economic status decreases, (2) is higher for children
than adults, and (3) is higher for women than men.
The event was the sinking of the passenger ship Titanic on its rst
voyage in 1912, when an iceberg tore open a series of watertight com-
partments. The boat was considered unsinkable, not enough lifeboats
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Table 3.3. Survival percentages separated by characteristics
Male
Economic Status Adult Child
High 32.6% of 175 100% of 5
Medium 8.3% of 168 100% of 11
Low 16.2% of 462 27.1% of 48
Other 22.3% of 862
Female
Economic Status Adult Child
High 97.2% of 144 100% of 1
Medium 86.0% of 93 100% of 13
Low 46.1% of 165 45.2% of 31
Other 87.0% of 23
Source: Simonoff 1997.
Table 3.4. Observed survival percentages by variable
Economic Status Percent Survived Age Percent Survived
High 62.5% of 325 Child 52.3% of 109
Medium 41.4% of 285 Adult 31.3% of 2092
Low 25.2% of 706
Other 24.0% of 885
Gender Percent survived
Female 73.2% of 470
Male 21.2% of 1731
Source: Simonoff 1997.
were available, and most of those who did not escape in lifeboats died. But
note that two different rules about the value of human life shaped this pat-
tern of mortality. Rule one is a social rule about class and status: higher-
status passengers were preserved at the expense of lower-status ones, and
passengers were saved before crew. (The economic status other refers
to the crew.) Rule two is a cultural rule about gender and age: within
economic status groups, females and the young survived at higher rates
than males. This differential treatment marks the event as a maritime
one, subject to the cultural rule of lifeboat access expressed as women
and children rst. Would we similarly nd better survival of women and
children in disasters such as famines, for example, or in accidents such
as large landslides or earthquakes?
The Titanic accident provides a simplied and stark example of the
many pathways through which social and cultural meanings get translated
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into mortality patterns. Insufcient lifeboats was the result of what epi-
demiologists might call a faulty environment or a devastating design
aw that placed those on board at higher risk of dying. Social class
stratication was manifested in the spatial separation of steerage pas-
sengers from high-class passengers who resided above the deck, and
stratication by age and gender pompously disguised as chivalry
determined that scarce lifeboat seats would be offered rst to women and
children.
The sinking of the Titanic is one of the most widely known examples
in epidemiology of the force culture has in inuencing how and when we
die. A focus on the social epidemiology of Titanic mortality helps show
the relationship between class and mortality, whereas a focus on cultural
epidemiology points out how rules about the value of women, children,
and crew in maritime accidents interact with rules about class.
B. National Assumptions about Social Worth: Vital Statistics
The Titanic example shows how environment and sociocultural rules for
behavior can create deadly patterns. But patterns also are created by bu-
reaucracies that devise categories to describe individuals who have died.
Systems of vital statistics (so-called because they refer to aspects of
vitae, or life) do some of this work. There have been global standards for
collecting vital statistics since 1900. Vital statistics allow patterns in the
deaths of citizens to become visible but also it should be remembered
to be obscured. Nation-states create patterned deaths in populations
through their labels their categorizations of the dead. For example,
infant mortality can be described by race, social class, or geographic lo-
cation. Each category creates different patterns. Political states form their
citizens preoccupations even as they precisely quantify and measure their
citizens demise. The categories of state surveillance create vital statistics.
This facilitates a conclusion that what one newly sees in vital statistics is
somehow self-evident and natural rather than something created out of
categories.
States create the conditions for life and death (Lock 2001). They also
create meanings for, and memories of, those who die. In a sense, states
breathe life into death; in Katherine Verderys words: Dead bodies have
enjoyed political life the world over and since far back in time (1999:1).
Predictably enough, states categorize and value people who are dead at
least in part according to the social worth they had when they were alive.
Indeed, the state engages in a kind of mass obituary-writing exercise by
the way it categorizes its citizens at death. The death certicate functions
as a record of state priorities; it reects and perpetuates conceptions of
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social worthandstatus, as well as dominationandoppression. By deciding
which social variables to record on the death certicate, the state makes
judgments about the value of life, the causes of death, and the moral
worth of individuals. In the process, it also steers health analysts toward
specic understandings about the politics of death.
The death certicate serves the nation as the primary source of de-
tail about those who have died. Because the international community
agrees that standardization is necessary and useful, there are global con-
ventions that govern the conceptualization, measurement, and recording
of death. The World Health Organization has a committee that publishes
worldwide standards (the latest version is called the International Classi-
cation of Diseases, Version 10, or ICD-10) for the types of information
that should be collected on death certicates (World Health Organization
1992). Options range from summarizing income or wealth to describing
skills, occupation, or economic relations (class) to labeling education,
physical appearance, religion, or area of residence. The United Nations
document Principles and Recommendations for a Vital Statistics Sys-
tem recommends that the following items are of highest priority in civil
registration: cause of death, date and place of occurrence, age, place of
residence, and sex (United Nations 2001). In addition, it also recom-
mends these items with somewhat lower priority, occupation, literacy/
level of formal education, marital status, number of children, status as
employer or employee, and age of surviving spouse.
Notwithstanding the existence of international standards, mortality
data are processed and used locally. So even though all nations collect
fairly similar data on their death certicates, countries can categorize and
analyze those data quite differently. If systems of vital statistics manifest
and form local prejudices, one should be able to see differences across
nations in the way they are collected and how they are used to describe
mortality. It is important to note, then, that despite the international rec-
ommendations for standards in collecting vital statistics through death
certicates (WHO ICD-10), all nations do not measure the social status
of their citizens in the same way. Even when they do measure the same
way, they do not all analyze or present their information in a consistent
fashion.
For example, Table 3.5 summarizes the social variables included
in death certicates from a range of countries. Although many cate-
gories appear in the death certicates of all four of these nations, only
the United States includes race and Hispanic origin, only Mexico in-
cludes citizenship, and only Argentina and, since 2001, the United
Kingdom includes an assessment of employment status in addi-
tion to occupation (differentiating housewives from the unemployed,
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Table 3.5. Social variables included in death certicates from four countries
Country and Year of Last Revision of Death Certicate
U.S.A. U.K. Mexico Argentina
Variable 2003 2001 1988 2001
Age

Sex

Birthplace

Usual occupation

Occupational category
Industry

(Type of
production)
Employment status

Hispanic origin?
Race
Citizenship
Schooling
(Highest grade)
(Years and level)
(Years)
Marital status

Source of health insurance
Habitual residence

Sources: Weed 1995; Ministerio de Salud, Argentina, 2001; Donkin et al. 2002; NCHS
2003; Instituto Nacional de Estadstica Geografa e Inform atica, Mexico, 2003.
for example). In the United States, education was added to the death
certicate for the rst time as recently as 1989, explicitly as a surrogate
for socioeconomic status (Tolson et al. 1991). The 2003 suggested revi-
sions to the U.S. death certicate include a race category with responses
ranging fromWhite to Asian Indian to Vietnamese (National Cen-
ter for Health Statistics 2003).
Almost all national data on mortality are rst produced on a death
certicate by a coroner, funeral director, or physician. But every country
has varying levels of accuracy in completing the demographic portions of
the certicate. For example, an evaluation of death certicates in South
Africa found information on education missing from almost 47% of cer-
ticates, occupation insufciently dened in 70%, and industry missing
from almost 84% (Government of South Africa 2001).
Even when death certicates are lled out thoroughly, however, id-
iosyncrasies in analysis can result in different interpretations of the effects
of social life on mortality. One common use of death certicates today is
to make claims about the relationship between social status and mortality.
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Many different types of measures of status are used, depending on what is
available in the death certicate and what other types of census or survey
measures can be linked to death certicates. But think about the variable
education for a moment: it can be measured as number of years of
school or as degree or certication obtained (Krieger et al. 1997).
Measuring education as number of years implies that there is a constant
increase in levels, such that the one year difference between sixth and
seventh grade is the same as the difference between eleventh and twelfth.
In contrast, education as degree or certication preserves the difference
between completing primary school or not and, even more important
in the United States, completing secondary school or not (Ibid.). These
arent right and wrong ways to measure education, rather they are right
for some purposes and wrong for others.
The measurement of occupation is another place where auxiliary mea-
surement theories play a role in vital statistics. Great Britain can use death
certicate information to analyze how relative social position might in-
uence mortality, whereas the United States is limited to analyses based
on type of work performed. This is because the United States collects
employment data based on usual occupation and industry. These data
are summarized for almost all statistical purposes into 23 census groups
that specify type of work performed rather than any measure of social or
economic status (unless one were to argue that, for example, members
of the major group farming, forestry, and shing are of lower status
than workers in the transportation and material moving group. [see
the description of the U.S. Standard Occupational Classication System
at: http://stats.bls.gov/soc/soc home.htm]) The British also collect data
on occupation, but their ve primary occupational categories are arrayed
along a spectrum of status and skill, from professional at one end to
unskilled at the other, creating ve levels of class.
Race is the variable most used to indicate social position in the United
States, whereas class status indicates position in England. The more
detailed categories of occupation in Argentinas death certicate might
lead one to suspect that its statistics would be full of conclusions about
work and mortality. But appearances can be deceiving here, too. In fact,
through June of 2001 the list of ofcial publications of the Instituto
Nacional de Estadstica y Censos (statistics ofce) of Argentina since
1984 still contains no title mentioning any social category other than
province of residence as a covariate of adult mortality.
Although occupation data seemingly could be used for this purpose in
Argentina, the socioeconomic portion of the death certicate in Argentina
for the past few decades has been lled out quite haphazardly, if at all.
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The national statistics ofce began a campaign in 2001 to increase the
accuracy and completeness of data on the death certicate. In its vital
statistics publications, the Argentine government expresses social posi-
tion only through province of residence. These provinces have been cat-
egorized into zones of high, medium, and low resources, and are used as
geographic indicators of social ranking (Verdejo 1998).
In Mexicos death certicate the variable health insurance provides
one useful clue to social position because government workers are in
one system, commercial workers in another, and oil industry or armed
forces members in others. But Mexico as a nation attends most closely
to social position based on ethnicity, separating indigenous from other
citizens based on language spoken. Because language is not included in
the death certicate, estimates of the mortality of indigenous groups are
calculated from other sources, such as special surveys, or from death
certicate data collected from municipalities with high proportions of
indigenous-language speakers (see Sepulveda 1993).
Thus, national systems of vital statistics respond differently to calls for
international standardization of death certicates. Not all recommended
variables are measured, and some idiosyncratic ones, such as race, are
added. Not all deaths are recorded, and the poor are less likely to be
counted in death just as they are counted less in life (see Scheper-Hughes
1992). Even when categories exist on forms they are not necessarily lled
out. And even when they are lled out, they are not necessarily analyzed
or published. What is published tends to reect, and constrain, national
debates about forms of intervention and prevention. It seems natural
to talk about race and mortality in the United States, but this is partly
because for many years it was the primary variable offered by our vital
statistics system to measure social stratication. Social epidemiologists
in the United States who wish to look at how class position inuences
mortality still cannot use death certicate data for this purpose because
the occupational categories used cannot easily be transformed into mea-
sures of class position. Epidemiologists and decision makers in Argentina
are even further distanced from identifying specic groups at high risk
because these differences are presented only as geographical differences.
The most important point about all these varied measures of social
position is that people of lowest status have higher infant and adult mor-
tality. Whether one looks at mortality rates of people ranked by province,
class, occupation, or language, lower status consistently predicts higher
mortality across nations. The pattern of death is the same in each of these
nation-states no matter what conventions of measurement have been se-
lected. But some death certicate forms make this easier to spot than
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others; some countries do not have the procedures or enforcement re-
quired to make their data useful, and others let categories like race or
indigenous language serve as a proxy for social class. These are some of
the cultural inuences on the statistics as well as the causes of mortality.
The next section looks more closely at one particular status measure,
namely race, as employed in United States health statistics.
C. Race as a Cultural Category and as a Risk Factor for Ill Health
The United States is one of the few countries that collects and uses race
data on death certicates. But just what is race, and what does it mean?
Despite the fact that race is commonly invoked in public health and med-
ical literature, denitions of race are rare, conicting, and muddled. Race
is such a central concept in American culture that it can be seen prac-
tically everywhere in clinical and epidemiologic reports published in the
United States. There was even a clinical volume titled Textbook of Black-
Related Diseases (Williams 1975). Public health researchers in the United
States often classify their populations by race, ethnicity, or national ori-
gin. These categories were used in just over 50% of the 914 articles on
human populations published in the American Journal of Public Health
(AJPH) between 1980 and 1989 (Ahdieh and Hahn 1996). Among the
many research articles in the AJPHusing racial and ethnic categories, only
a small percentage (8%) included clear denitions of these terms. Race
is included in research articles even when it is irrelevant to the disease
explored: this was the case for 82% of the AJPH research articles, and
40% of 313 published medical case reports reviewed elsewhere (Negre
1985).
The rest of the world is not so obsessed with race as a marker: a review
of online articles from the U.S. National Library of Medicine (MedLine)
from 1990 to 1996 demonstrated that 80% of studies of infant mortality
from the United States mentioned race or ethnicity, whereas only 22%
of studies from outside the United States mentioned these two categories
(Anderson and Moscou 1998). U.S. health researchers appear to pay
extensive attention to these characteristics yet neither dene them well
nor use them consistently.
Critics of the use of race as a biological variable argue that it cannot
capture and explain human variability. Genetic variation is widespread
and gradual; no sharp geographic differences clearly separate racial
groups. Genetic studies showconclusively that the variationwithingroups
labeled as White and Black is greater than variation between those
groups (Lewontin 1972) so these labels give a false sense of group
coherence.
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Yet race is always grouped into a nite number of categories. Some
of these still carry vestiges of nineteenth-century social and biological
thinking about racial superiority (categories of Caucasian vs. Negroid vs.
Mongoloid). Other racial categories are based on an arbitrary labeling of
skin color as white versus black versus yellowversus red. Others are based
on a combination of language, skin color, and national origin (White,
Black, Hispanic). Still others, such as the ve racial categories adopted
by the United States government in 1997, combine skin color and ge-
ographic origin (White, Hispanic, Black or African American, Native
Hawaiian or other Pacic Islander, American Indian or Alaska Native).
This was the rst time the government separated the ethnic category of
language (Hispanic) from the other racial categories, allowing it to be ap-
plied to all of them. But what sort of human variability is being measured
if the categories include both skin color and geographic origin, are based
on self-assessment, and change over time?
Besides, genetic variation exists in many characteristics other than skin
tone, and there is no packet of physical characteristics that varies consis-
tently with skin tone. Classifying people into races based on skin color is
as arbitrary as choosing hair color, nose shape, or earlobe size no single
physical trait can encompass human diversity. The clinical consequences
of racialist assumptions can be quite serious. For example, when the ge-
netic disorder that causes sickle cell disease is thought to be conned to
people of African ancestry, a White child entering the emergency room
suffering from sickle cell-induced hemolytic crisis may not be diagnosed
as readily as she would have been if she were Black. Because the sickle
cell trait was an evolutionary response to the presence of malaria it be-
came distributed among populations exposed to malaria, including those
in southern Europe, India, and the Middle East. The gene is distributed
along geographic, not racial, lines, but racialist thinking can exacerbate
the social toll exacted by sickle cell disease.
The U.S. federal government ofcially began to acknowledge the com-
plexity of human mixing when it allowed people to select multiple racial
categories on the national census forms in 2000. About 6.8 million peo-
ple, or 2.4% of the United States population, reported during the census
that they belonged to more than one race (U.S. Bureau of the Census
2001b). Those reporting more than one race tended to be younger than
those reporting just one race, reecting how these identity choices can
change over generations. Among those younger than 18, 34% of re-
spondents saying they had one race also reported Hispanic or Latino
origin, whereas among those reporting two or more races, the pro-
portion of Hispanic or Latino origin was 43%. If racial classications
change from one generation to another, the public health outcome is
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an inability to compare racial measures from early studies with those
from later ones.
Race is such a central component of identity in the United States that
researchers include it almost by default. Proponents of racial categoriza-
tion argue that it is a proxy for genetic variation, however imperfect,
and that it is empirically correlated with health problems ranging from
cardiovascular disease to diabetes, cervical cancer, lead poisoning, and
handgun deaths. The presumed connection between race and genetics is
frequently taken to extremes, leading some researchers to attribute dif-
ferences in IQ scores, sports performance, and health indicators to race
rather than to the effect of race in a racist society.
Anthropologists argue that race is a social category, not a biological one
(Armelagas and Goodman 1998, Goodman 1997, Tapper 1999). Racial
discrimination against Blacks still limits opportunities, reduces inherited
wealth, and creates health-reducing discrepancies between aspirations
and status. Being Black in the United Status does not mean having
different genes thanbeing White because there is more genetic variation
within each group than between them. But it does often imply having
lower economic status, lower educational attainment, reduced access to
health and housing services, exposure to environmental contamination,
inadequate or nonexistent health insurance, and differential treatment
by police and health personnel, to name just a few dimensions. Rather
than marking genetic difference, then, the variable called race marks
a broad range of concepts extending from stress and discrimination to
physical environment and diet. Race is social rather than biological
and carries many different meanings. (To emphasize the social content
of race, from here on I will refer to the concept and to individual racial
categories using quotation marks.)
If race has such poor theoretical foundations and is impossible to de-
ne or measure well, why does it continue to be so widely used in public
health and medical research? There is a legitimate argument for contin-
uing to include race as a component of epidemiological research: even
though the biological basis of race has been thoroughly discredited,
the social uses of race continue to have biological effects. In a racially
stratied society, race sorts people into social categories and sets them
on different life trajectories. This in turn inuences their earning poten-
tial, educational achievement, access to health services, occupation, and
lifestyles, which result in denite and measurable biological outcomes. In
order to identify and intervene in health disparities, it is therefore some-
times useful to collect information by race, if only to see the effects
of racism. The problem emerges when the category of race gets used
uncritically to classify categories of people. Such pigeonholing reinforces
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and perpetuates the impression that health problems are linked only to
biology rather than to histories of oppression and continuing racial dis-
crimination. Pigeonholing can foster a tendency to blame the victim, by
implying that health disparities are located in race instead of in racism.
Rather than continuing to rely on race as a characteristic of individuals
or groups, it would make more sense to investigate the social effects and
biological consequences of racism. The next section explores and cri-
tiques the assumptions governing the broad use of race as a predictive
variable in public health.
:cascniNc ibcN1i1v aNb oniciN
Federal agencies do a poor job of dening and measuring race, ethnicity,
and national origin. According to medical anthropologist Robert Hahn
(1992), the variable race/ethnicity misses all four key qualities required
of variables if they are to be good choices for use in national statistics.
1. Categories must be consistently dened and ascertained. Hahn
shows that respondents and observers classify race differently, even
though the census says race is determined by self-identication. He and
his colleagues analyzed data from the National Health and Nutrition
Exam Survey to see how ethnic identity changed after 10 years:
r
42% of respondents specied a different primary ancestral identica-
tion at follow-up;
r
15% gave a primary identication at the rst interview that did not
match any of up to four ethnic backgrounds they gave at the follow-up
interview; and
r
45% of proxies (comprised predominantly [89%] of spouses, room-
mates, children, and siblings, and 11%by nonrelatives) gave a different
primary ancestry for subjects than the subjects themselves had given
(Hahn et al. 1995:79).
2. Categories and designations are understood by the population being
counted. Hahn and others (e.g., Hahn and Stroup 1994, Mays et al. 2003)
have documented that racial and ethnic categories mix categories of ge-
ographic origin (Pacic Islander) with labels of skin color (Black/White)
and ethnic categories based on shared characteristics of language and cul-
ture along with geographic origin (Hispanic, Native American, Asian).
These categories periodically get changed by government agencies, and
they have no necessary correspondence to populations self-perception.
3. Enumeration, participation, and response rates are high and sim-
ilar for all racial and ethnic populations. For vital statistics to provide
valid estimates of subpopulations, those subpopulations must have equal
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chances to be counted. Yet Hahn cites data showing that births are under-
registered for some groups, race is misclassied at death for some
groups, and both miscounting and survey nonresponse rates differ among
racial and ethnic groups (Hahn 1992).
4. Responses of individuals are consistent in different data sources
and across time. Hahn and colleagues investigated the racial classication
of U.S. infants (age less than one year) who died between 1983 through
1985 and whose birth and death certicates could be linked. In this group,
race noted at birth differed from race noted at death among 3.7%
of the infants (Hahn et al. 1992:261). The size of this difference varied
greatly by race: it changed among 1.2% of infants classied White
at birth, among 4.3% of those classied as Black at birth, but among
43.2% of those with a racial classication other than White or Black
at birth. And these infants whose racial classication changed largely
became White: the number of infants classied White at death was
2.5%higher than at birth, whereas the number classied Black at death
was 1.9% lower than at birth, and the number classied Filipino was
44.5%lower than at birth (Hahn et al. 1992:261). Because the number of
misclassied infant deaths is higher in these non-White groups, the real
rates of infant mortality for non-Whites are even higher than estimated.
In summary, public health researchers in the United States often
stratify citizens by race and use this label even when it is undened
and irrelevant to the subject at hand. Being one among many compo-
nents of identity, racial classications change over time and are rarely
well-bounded or well-dened. Used as an analytic category for public
health purposes, race mixes personal with environmental characteris-
tics, maintains stereotypes, and provides illusory risk information. Using
race as a marker of disease patterns makes little sense because it rein-
forces the confusion between social and genetic causes of illness. In this
case, poorly justied indicators provide support for ill-dened concepts.
Some public health practitioners have argued that race can be used
as an indicator of social rather than genetic difference. They note that
race is unquestionably associated with health differences, but that it is
a marker of experience rather than genetic make-up (see Jones 2001, in a
commentary that discusses how to use race in epidemiologic practice).
Kaufman and Cooper (2001), for example, point out that aspects of di-
agnosis and treatment that may be related to race or ethnicity can and
should be studied. This can be done by using actors or sample records to
vary race and ethnicity systematically when presenting medical cases
or records, while holding constant other aspects of identity and disease.
Researchers can thereby uncover the specic health-related inuence of
ideas about race and behaviors toward different races. These authors
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recommend continuing to use race or ethnicity cautiously as a part of
monitoring disparities in health care and disease rates over time. They
also recommend using it where race or ethnicity might inuence social
interactions between patients and health services. But they do not rec-
ommend using racial or ethnic variables in studies of disease causation.
D. Determining Who and What Gets Counted
Another aspect of the category person consists of decisions about who
should be included as a case. Case denitions are critical components of
epidemiologic studies they determine howmany cases will be compared
with a population total. Arriving at valid diagnoses in cross-cultural epi-
demiologic studies requires accurately and consistently dening cases,
but this is a source of debate between some anthropologists and epi-
demiologists. The basic concerns from the anthropological side are with
the legitimacy of applying Western disease categories to non-Western
groups, the accuracy and validity of using large-scale surveys to assess
health status, and whether the complexity of culture can be reduced to
a set of predictive variables. One example of this controversy grew out
of the 1950s and 1960s collaboration between psychiatric epidemiolo-
gists and anthropologists studying the relationship between culture and
mental status in the Stirling County studies (see Chapter 2). As psy-
chiatric epidemiologists grew increasingly interested in establishing clear
and consistent case denitions across different cultures, a strong critique
of epidemiologic categories developed in the 1990s, labeled the new
cross-cultural psychiatry.
Is it better (more valid and effective) to use varied local denitions of
mental status or consistent but foreign denitions? Advocates of the new
cross-cultural psychiatry propose that the concept of culture be used more
as a description of context than as a type of causal agent in epidemiologic
studies of mental status. The difference can be seen in the contrasting
viewpoints between the psychiatric epidemiologist Jane Murphy and the
anthropologist Byron Good. Murphy pleads for anthropologists to pre-
pare maps and draw boundaries so that cultural areas can be identied
where certain beliefs are widely if not universally subscribed (1994a:54).
Good, by contrast, argues for more explicit focus on local social and cul-
tural environments (1997:243). Murphy wants anthropologists to make
it easier to categorize population denominators by drawing clear bound-
aries among cultural groups; Good conceives of culture not as geograph-
ically bounded but rather as starting from heterogeneity, stratication
of power and wealth, and contested claims (1997:243). These changes
in the concept of culture have prompted anthropologists to become more
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critical of epidemiologic perspectives that would employ culture as a risk
factor like any other (DiGiacomo 1999).
Culture also is coming into vogue in biomedicine as doctors discover
how culture affects clinical encounters, doctor-patient communication,
and compliance, as well as the health proles of populations. Greater at-
tention to culture cannot but be positive in a multicultural society, where
a long history of biomedical dominance has spawned a huge industry of
alternative and complementary health practices. By asking about peo-
ples understandings of disease etiology, best treatment, correlates, and
likely outcome, physicians can better appreciate how to treat patients and
prevent disease. This is the logic behind the cultural competency move-
ment, in which medical students and practicing professionals are trained
to recognize and handle cultural difference. But culture is too easily over-
simplied, and one pitfall of the cultural competency movement is that
it tends to locate culture out there, in patients (see the warnings in
Denberg et al. 2003). Culture is not a list of traits, nor should anyone
assume that ethnicity, language, or religion are accurate indicators of
belief. Some of the more egregious cultural competency formulations ig-
nore the fact that we are all immersed in culture and that biomedicine has
culture, too.
Medical training in cultural competence is one example of the ten-
sion between dening culture as an assemblage of traits and dening
it as a set of contested meanings. An online publication called The
Providers Guide to Quality and Culture, from the Managers Elec-
tronic Resource Center (available online at: http://erc.msh.org/), in 2002
described the health-related strengths and protective factors and di-
mensions of vulnerability for ve different groups in the United States,
labeled as African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics/ Latinos,
Native Americans, and Pacic Islanders. By 2004 it had added four more
groups. This website is plastered with warnings not to stereotype, but
from an anthropological perspective it looks like a crude cultural cook-
book that equates ethnic identity with specic health beliefs and behavior.
Notice that some of these ve groups are labeled by geographic origin and
others by language. One could be left with the mistaken impression that
the Asian origins of upper-class Pakistani Muslims, middle-class Thai
Buddhists, and working-class Spanish-speaking Catholic Filipinos in the
United States somehow give a common unifying identity relevant to their
health status and behavior, and that the concept of culture maps neatly
onto the ethnic and racial categories used only in the United States. The
sites advisory notice that the categories of regions and groups included
here are somewhat arbitrary (Management Sciences for Health 2004)
does not address this concern.
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Aspects of Place 63
If culture becomes oversimplied in this fashion, then those who follow
these guidelines risk blinding themselves to variability, contingency, and
struggle. If one starts to think that all Puerto Ricans, all Asian Americans,
or all poor urban residents are the same by virtue of a common label, then
one loses the ability to see how history, environment, and experience
inuence identity and behavior.
IV. Aspects of Place
Variables categorized as place inuence health in some relatively straight-
forward ways: the living organisms (parasites, viruses, bacteria) that cause
most infectious diseases are often affected by place-based factors such as
temperature and humidity. Parasites, for example, ourish in warmer
humid places, and as such are a primary focus of so-called tropical
medicine. Soil nutrients can be absorbed by humans through the con-
sumption of crops: iodine-poor soils can cause goiter, and foods low in
iron can cause anemia (Cohen 1989). Many international epidemiologic
studies are now investigating the effects of site-specic Vitamin A de-
ciencies on blindness or zinc deciencies on susceptibility to diarrheal
diseases.
The inuence of place can be seen easily in the distribution of vector-
borne diseases such as malaria or yellowfever, both spread by mosquitoes.
The maps in Figure 3.1 showchanges over time in the spread of the Aedes
aegypti mosquito, a major vector for dengue and yellow fever.
Place is complex in many of the same ways that person is. It can refer to
aspects of the natural physical as well as the built (human) environment.
It can include everything from water quality to crime levels, job avail-
ability, or exposure to chronic stress. Places inuence patterns of health
because they expose residents to systematically different qualities of the
natural physical environment (e.g., ultraviolet levels in sunlight, or mi-
cronutrient levels in soil). But of course humans have modied many as-
pects of the natural physical environment: deep wells expose Bangladeshi
villagers to high levels of arsenic in their water, and smokestacks push
small particulate matter or sulfur dioxide into the air breathed by resi-
dents of Mexico City or Los Angeles. Neighborhoods have diverse socio-
cultural features, including varied politics, history, norms, threats, and
networks. And they have varied reputations among residents, outsiders,
and planners (Macintyre et al. 1993:220221, Macintyre et al. 2002).
Anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, and epidemiologists are all
trying to untangle the more subtle and complex ways that local area inu-
ences individual behavior and disease risk. As explained in more detail in
the next section, intrahousehold patterns of behavior can inuence who
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Figure 3.1. Distribution (shaded) of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in the
Americas in 1970, at the end of the mosquito eradication program, and
in 1997. Source: CDC Division of Vector-Borne Infectious Diseases,
available online at: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid/dengue/map-ae-
aegypti-distribution.htm.
becomes sick in a family; but social exchange networks between families
also can inuence howpathogens travel, and movement of key individuals
across networks can bring new pathogens to distant regions.
A. Through What Social and Cultural Pathways Does
Place Inuence Health?
One way place inuences health is through neighborhood of residence.
Sociologists have documented that neighborhood characteristics inu-
ence howyoung children and adolescents develop. More specically, they
have shown in the United States that the presence or absence of afuent
neighbors or classmates inuences teenage birthrates, childhood IQ, and
school-leaving (Brooks-Gunn et al. 1993); that neighborhood context
inuences young womens use of contraceptives and risk of nonmarital
intercourse (Brewster 1994); and that it inuences teenagers probability
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Aspects of Place 65
of dropping out of school or having children (Crane 1991). Studies by
epidemiologists have suggested that neighborhood social environment
inuences, among other outcomes, general mortality (Yen and Kaplan
1999a), risk for developing depressive symptoms and decline in per-
ceived health status (Yen and Kaplan 1999b), and womens heart disease
mortality (LeClere et al. 1998). Neighborhood may inuence behav-
ior and disease through prevailing social norms, exposure or protec-
tion from pathogens, and even attraction of people at increased risk of
disease.
Because humans live in close proximity, each person is invariably in-
uenced by many others. Like it or not, our ability to enjoy good health
and survival is determined, to a considerable degree, by the beliefs, mo-
tives, and preferences of our neighbors (Granovetter 1978). For example,
epidemiologists know that those who do not immunize their children are
relatively safe frominfection so long as a high proportion of the surround-
ing population continues to immunize. This herd immunity protects
all members of the population regardless of their immunization status
because overall protection is high enough to prevent isolated cases from
widely spreading their infection.
Because we live in a society that favors autonomy and independence,
we often act as though the risk of disease is independent for each individ-
ual. Yet in the preceding paragraphs I have argued that the risk for any
one individual is often contingent on the behavior of others; for example,
on the proportion of those who already engage in some health-reducing
or health-enhancing activity or who have already been exposed to an
infection or other insult (see Koopman and Longini Jr. 1994). People
become increasingly likely to contract an infectious disease as the num-
ber of cases around them increases, or as they become increasingly likely
to meet infected cases because of migration or by virtue of having simi-
lar practices. For example, the likelihood that an intravenous drug user
will become infected with HIV increases as HIV rates increase among
people with whom he or she shares needles, and the likelihood that a
teenager will smoke increases as the proportion of her friends who smoke
increases.
The social context of disease is particularly interesting to anthropolo-
gists because of the connections between social mixing (another aspect
of place) and disease transmission. The average number of people one
comes in contact with per day can inuence exposure to infectious dis-
eases. But so can the proportion of people one knows who in turn know
and contact one another, as well as the number of intermediaries be-
tween one person and another within a network (Morris 1993, Wallinga
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et al. 1999). Population mobility can change all of these aspects of
connectedness.
Two biological anthropologists, Lisa Sattenspiel and Ann Herring
(1998), demonstrated these complex relationships when they studied his-
torical data describing the 19181919 inuenza epidemic in northern
Canada in isolated Hudsons Bay Company posts linked by rivers. They
used census data, company records of visits, and mortality records to help
reconstruct both the visiting patterns among three trading posts and the
spread of the epidemic. Mathematical models helped them to simulate
what would have happened to the severity and timing of the epidemic
if it had started at one or another of the three sites, if contact rates dif-
fered within communities and between communities, and if rates of travel
differed among communities. They showed that the severity of the epi-
demic was determined primarily by contact rates within communities,
whereas the timing of the epidemic was affected by contact rates within
communities and by mobility patterns between communities.
Increasingly sophisticated theories and research methods are allowing
joint aspects of place and person to be studied to explain patterns of dis-
ease transmission more fully. For example, an outbreak of tuberculosis
in Houston, Texas, was studied using methods from molecular biology,
epidemiology, ethnography, and network analysis (Klovdahl et al. 2001).
Most epidemics of infectious diseases are investigated using so-called
contact tracing, where an infected individual is asked to identify others
who might have become infected. In this study, however, DNA tech-
niques allowed the researchers to ngerprint the tuberculosis strains
in the epidemic and thereby identify which people had been infected
with a common strain. Interviewing patients uncovered only 12 person-
to-person contacts among 37 infected people with an identical strain of
tuberculosis. However, by combining network analysis with attention to
places where these individuals might have been together, the researchers
were able to show that at least 29 of these 37 people could be linked di-
rectly through other people or indirectly through places they frequented.
Interdisciplinary teams such as these are combining their theories and
methods to develop increasingly powerful, complex, subtle, and accurate
models of place.
Another example of how categories of person, place, and time come
together through ethnographic studies involves an investigation of how
local context inuences needle-injection practices and risk of contract-
ing HIV. As part of a multi-site study to understand and reduce AIDS
and hepatitis risk among intravenous drug users, an interdisciplinary
team of epidemiologists, anthropologists, and microbiologists (Singer
et al. 2000) used a broad series of qualitative methods to understand
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Aspects of Place 67
how neighborhoods inuenced drug use. These methods, part of what
the researchers label a larger ethnoepidemiologic study, included the
following:
1. Bringing intravenous drug users from a single neighborhood together
to draw maps of the sites, people, and behaviors inuencing their
drug use. These maps, and the discussion they generated, helped re-
searchers understand the distances and pathways that intravenous
drug users cover over the course of a day, as well as the type and
spatial relationships of places of interest to [them](Ibid., 2000:1050).
2. Observing and describing specic neighborhoods in the three study
areas, including physical and social characteristics; locations of build-
ings, businesses, social agencies; zones of gang and police activity;
and daily events recorded in newspapers. This allowed researchers
to understand the specic character of neighborhoods and how they
changed over time. For example, they found that heroin was sold in
the morning in one neighborhood, whereas crack cocaine was sold in
the late afternoon in another.
3. Having participants keep daily diaries of their drug-related and survival
strategies helpedresearchers understandindividuals coping strategies,
variations in their behavior over time, and contextual inuences on
these behaviors.
4. Accompanying drug users for half-day visits on their normal activities
allowed researchers to experience how the drug users perceive and
respond to the places they inhabited, how study participants inter-
acted with a broad range of individuals, and how they managed the
contingencies and unexpected events that occurred.
5. Accompanying a small subsample of individuals as they acquired sy-
ringes, and then using DNA tests to see whether the syringes had
been previously used. This strategy showed what types of neighbor-
hood sources were likely to distribute used versus sterile syringes. By
putting this together with other information, researchers were able to
estimate the likelihood that previously used syringes would be acquired
in each of the target neighborhoods.
6. Interviewing andobserving a subsample of participants as they injected
and used drugs helped researchers appreciate the specic behaviors
that might inuence the risk of acquiring HIV or hepatitis from used
needles and the social relationships among drug users.
The combination of these methods, rather than any one by itself, gave
the research team a detailed picture of specic local contexts, varia-
tions, and insights about how to intervene to reduce risks in specic local
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settings. This is a good example of how contemporary researchers mix
methods to unpack the complex processes by which intravenous drug use
eventuates in HIV infection.
V. Aspects of Time
A. Through What Social and Cultural Pathways Does
Time Inuence Health?
Aspects of time can be as different as age, season, schedule, calendar
time, or circadian rhythm. There are many obvious ways that time in-
uences disease risk, most notably with respect to chronological age.
Age inuences to which diseases and injuries human bodies are suscep-
tible. Infectious diseases such as chickenpox or measles predominantly
attack the young, conferring a level of immunity that lowers the incidence
among adults. Chronic diseases such as hypertension or type II diabetes
and degenerative conditions such as osteoporosis attack primarily the
old. Sexually transmitted viruses such as HIV are usually spread among
those old enough to be having sex, unless transmitted at childbirth or
neonatally through breast milk. But categorizing a few less-recognized
inuences of time on disease allows us to see new challenges for health
research.
Anthropologists have long paid ethnographic attention to activity
changes over time, cataloguing things such as seasonal rounds, ritual
cycles, and cyclical migrations. Paradoxically, however, they have played
a small role in connecting those time-centered activities to health out-
comes. For example, if time allocation studies could be better linked to
exposure to disease risk, anthropologists might have a powerful contri-
bution to make to studies of time as a causal agent.
Whether time is conceived as moments between breaths, crops, moon
phases, rotations of the earth, or more than nine billion cycles of a
Cesium-133 atom, the perception and measurement of time is a cultur-
ally constructed activity. Humans have created and adapted to the relaxed
timeline and schedule of hunter gatherers as well as the tense and sched-
uled stresses of the urban worker. Howmuch time is spent exercising, and
how much time a nervous system spends in an excited, catecholamine-
ooded state both appear to inuence risk of heart disease. How much
time people make available for sick children seems to inuence propen-
sity to overmedicate with antibiotics and anti-hyperactivity medications.
The instruction that pills be taken three times a day with meals shows
that cultural assumptions about the timing and frequency of meals are
brought to bear in regulating health-related behavior. The perception of
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Aspects of Time 69
Table 3.6. Recognition of malarial threat by season in
Tanzania
Percent of inhabitants
who recognized a grave
threat from: Season
Rainy Harvest Cold
Fever from malaria 81% 50% 35%
Fever that does not 76% 70% 60%
respond to any treatment
Source: Winch et al. 1994.
time, and the perception that time itself can exert pressure be spent,
wasted, or saved has different effects on disease in different places.
Humans divide the world into units of time and associate certain ac-
tivities and processes with those units to inuence patterns of disease
and death. Ideas about malaria transmission during locally perceived
seasons helps inuence whether some Tanzanians nd it worthwhile to
use preventive technologies such as insecticide-impregnated bed nets
throughout the year. A study combining anthropology and epidemiology
showed that time of year played a critical role in peoples recognition of
disease and their willingness to use bed nets (Winch et al. 1994). These
researchers found that people accurately perceived uctuations in the
number of mosquitoes present at different times of the year but associ-
ated the risk of malaria with the concentration of mosquitoes, not realizing
that the proportion of infectious mosquitoes increases as mosquitoes age
and their numbers diminish. Residents did not realize that malaria could
be transmitted year round. Most fevers were in fact caused by malaria,
but in the low-mosquito season, people attributed fevers to causes other
than malaria. They distinguished between types of fever not by symptoms
but by the season in which they occurred (Table 3.6).
Along with the perceived etiology of fever, the willingness to use bed
nets to prevent fever from malaria varied by season. During the cold
season, people were much less likely to perceive malaria as a threat, and
therefore much less likely to use bed nets. In addition, if an epidemiologic
study of malarial fever were to be undertaken in this site, the season of
administration of a symptom-based survey would inuence the measured
prevalence of malarial fevers. Perceptions of time and its classication
inuence both willingness to adopt new preventive strategies and ability
to accurately measure disease burden. Let us look at some additional
examples.
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o1ncn coNNcc1ioNs nc1wccN 1i:c aNb ncaL1n
Anthropological insights could help to explain, expand, or rene some
of the associations that epidemiologists have made between time and
health. For example, there is some epidemiologic evidence that people
are likelier to live up to or just beyond their birthdays than they are to
die just before reaching them (Phillips et al. 1992). This link requires a
symbolic attachment to a particular date and a mechanism whereby that
attachment, expressed as a will to live, a desire to avoid risky behavior,
or another motivation, prompts or causes a physiological or behavioral
response. Anthropologists might ask whether a similar trend in mortality
happens in countries where individuals celebrate a saints day rather than
a birthday. Is mortality evenly distributed in places where people have
other personally meaningful annual events to anticipate? Data are not
available yet to answer these questions, but there is evidence of an uneven
distribution of childbirth among Chinese in Hong Kong: relatively more
births happen there during Dragon Years, which are considered lucky
(Yip et al. 2002).
A second link between time and health is found in circadian rhythms
and chronobiological research, showing, for example, the physiological
reasons why heart attacks are more likely to take place in the morning than
at other times (Portaluppi et al. 1999), why depression is linked to lower
ambient light levels in winter (Magnusson 2000), or why women tend
to menstruate at the new moon in areas without electricity (Law 1986).
Research like this has led to suggestions that epidemiologists need to take
time more seriously, reducing their present tendency to see health risk as
evenly distributed across time. This rationale heightens the signicance of
the Tanzanian seasonality and malaria example: such studies raise ques-
tions about whether time measurements are taken for granted in many
epidemiological research designs.
Amore complex connection between time and health includes, in addi-
tion to seasonal events, connections between daily and weekly behaviors
and health-related consequences. For example, more cardiac arrests in
North America appear to take place on Monday (linked to the beginning
of the work week) and in winter (linked to lower exercise punctuated with
the heavy exertion of snow shoveling) (Gallerani et al. 1992, Peckova
et al., 1999). Adolescent pregnancies cluster at the end of the school
year in early summer (Petersen and Alexander 1992), and adolescent
suicides are more frequent on Monday/Tuesday between afternoon and
evening, after the school week has begun anew and when parental su-
pervision is lower (Nakamura et al. 1994). All of these, of course, are
predicated on the existence of a seven-day week, with a culturally de-
ned day or days (Friday, Saturday, and/or Sunday) available for rest.
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Aspects of Time 71
Unlike days, months, or years, the seven-day week has no astronomical
referent.
These are goodexamples of links betweentime andpersonbecause they
result from predictable and regular variations in behavior over different
time periods. They also illustrate how culture inuences disease: in this
case, the cultural convention of a seven-day week and a ve-day work
week beginning Monday helps create a series of health-related patterns.
The time-sensitive behavior of professional caretakers also inuences
health: births in the United States are less likely to take place on week-
ends and holidays, no matter what the method of delivery. There are
14% fewer births on Saturday, and 21% fewer births on Sunday, than
the average for weekdays (CDC 1993). Mortality rates are signicantly
higher for people with a few specic serious medical conditions admitted
to hospitals on weekends compared with weekdays, presumably because
of lower stafng levels (Bell and Redelmeier 2001). There is (debated)
evidence that caesarean section rates increase before midnight or the
weekend (CDC 1993, Fraser et al. 1987), and that the quality of med-
ical care, or at least medical record-keeping, declines in July, when new
hospital residents in the United States start their training (Shulkin 1995).
There are undoubtedly many other seasonal and cyclical time and disease
patterns awaiting discovery and investigation.
Less well-known and explored is the role time plays in how household
members manage care. Medical anthropologists recently have begun to
describe the ways that perceived time pressure, or time famine, inu-
ences peoples choice of medications, creating preferences for medica-
tions advertised as fast-acting or as specic for daytime or nighttime
use (e.g., Vuckovic 1999). Time availability also inuences womens abil-
ity to prepare nutritionally adequate foods for their children (Cosminsky
et al. 1993). Other aspects of time famine were revealed in the 1950s,
when household time allocation began to be studied in developing coun-
tries. In a classic 1955 study of impediments to water boiling in Peru, for
example, poor women had trouble nding time in their busy day to build
res and boil water (Wellin 1955).
Finally, to bring us back to the link between culture, behavior, time, and
health risk, there is a profoundly creative act of time manipulation in the
United States every year: setting clocks one hour ahead early on the rst
Sunday in April brings more daylight during summer workdays. Clocks
are returned to Standard Time early on the last Sunday in October. This
creates its own inherent health risks: there are fewer fatal car crashes
overall during Daylight Saving Time (Ferguson et al. 1995), and the
number of fatal car crashes increases each year immediately after the
switch back to Standard Time from Daylight Saving Time (Hicks, Davis
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and Hicks 1998). Thus the human decision to change clock time also
changes mortality.
Time is the epidemiologic variable least explored by social scientists. I
have described a few examples of the cultural patterning of time and of
its effects on morbidity and mortality. Other fascinating examples await
research attention. To be able to assess whether time exerts this inu-
ence on other kinds of disease categorization or behavior, Winch et al.
(1994) argued that researchers should include the following steps in their
research projects:
r
Obtain a list of locally recognized diseases.
r
Ask about causes, symptoms, treatments, and resources for those dis-
eases.
r
Ask if any diseases are more prevalent at specic times.
r
Obtain a list of seasonal events/markers/indicators.
r
Associate timing of events with months.
r
Determine perceived relationships between events and diseases.
Similar exploratory strategies could be useful in many types of epi-
demiologic surveys in non-Western contexts. These types of anthropo-
logical methods of participant observation and analyses of meaning can
play a larger role in exploring the effects of time on human health. In
fact, although developed specically with reference to understanding lo-
cal categorizations of time, these steps also might be used to explore local
perceptions of relationships between categories of person or place and
disease.
VI. Conclusion
Each topic reviewed in this chapter showed that some of the deni-
tions and measures employed by health researchers regarding person,
place, and time were culture-bound and therefore more arbitrary than
the researchers would wish. Biomedical theories and cultural assump-
tions about the world pervade epidemiological studies, limiting the com-
plexity, validity, and generalizability of epidemiologic results. To return
to the notion of auxiliary measurement theories, what happens is that epi-
demiologists nd statistical associations between variables as they have
measured them, but they mistakenly conclude that these associations
also exist between the (sometimes ill-dened) concepts underlying their
measured variables. Evidence about stratication gets investigated and
interpreted as evidence about racial differences; evidence about social
context gets interpreted as individual difference; and evidence about
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human interpretation gets interpreted as natural fact. Early and exten-
sive collaboration among epidemiologists and anthropologists and other
social scientists using qualitative methods can increase conceptual clarity
and analytic quality.
FOR FURTHER READING
Berkman L. F. and I. Kawachi, eds. 2000. Social Epidemiology. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 1993. Use of race and ethnicity in
public health surveillance. Summary of the CDC/ATSDRworkshop. Morbidity
and Mortality Weekly Report 42(RR10):117.
Fitzpatrick K. and M. LaGory. 2000. Unhealthy Places: The Ecology of Risk in the
Urban Landscape. New York: Routledge.
Gould S. J. 1981. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton.
Mascie-Taylor C. G., ed. 1990. Biosocial Aspects of Social Class. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
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4 Cultural Issues in Measurement and Bias
Q. Whats the difference between an anthropologist and an epidemiologist?
A. The anthropologist thinks that the plural of anecdote is data.
(Anonymous)
I. Introduction
Anthropology and epidemiology are dedicated directly or indirectly to
the study of human cultural practices and how those practices affect hu-
man health and disease. They must be fundamentally concerned with
the theories that help guide and explain their discoveries as well as
with the methods used to make those discoveries. Chapter 2 explained
that these disciplines began with a fundamental concern for eldwork,
with the researchers always rening and adjusting how and why they
collect information. Chapter 3 reviewed a few of the variables used to de-
scribe disease patterns, showing that new questions and concerns are
raised when social scientists, particularly anthropologists, unpack the
assumptions underlying such variables. This chapter pays more specic
attention to the collection of data. I argue that data collection is built
on a series of cultural conventions, not all of which facilitate valid
measurement. Data collection is improved when those conventions are
acknowledged and confronted.
The chapter-opening quote and Figure 4.1 show some of the cultural
conventions around data collection. The quote portrays a standard cri-
tique of anthropology, namely that it studies too few people and mistakes
mere anecdote for data. Figure 4.1 shows a standard kind of cartoon
genre, the public opinion poll. This one pokes fun at the pollsters and
all the invisible interpretive errors that can take place between a household
interview and a nal monolithic summary statistic. Both jokes manifest
some underlying discomforts about how we learn what we know. Why
cant stories be understood and used as data? How can we know when
snores are miscounted as presidential support?
74
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75
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Three concepts are usually helpful in guiding discussions of the quality
of data collection: validity, reliability, and generalizability. Although scien-
tists dene validity in many ways, the concept refers to correspondence
between what one thinks one is measuring and what one is really mea-
suring. Reliability, on the other hand, is the likelihood that a measure will
repeatedly yield the same results. Reliability can be dened as similar re-
sults over time from multiple uses of the same test, or it can be dened as
similar assessments reached by multiple observers. Generalizability refers
to the possibility that a studys outcomes based on a sample also will apply
to the broader group from which the sample is drawn.
Anthropologists do many things to avoid anecdote. They often seek to
increase the accuracy of their methods by relying on participant observa-
tion, an approach to doing research that relies on long-term contact with
a specic place and community. (See the description in the next section
of howparticipant observation methods helped an anthropologist suggest
culturally valid measures of infant mortality in Brazil.) Anthropologists
commonly write eldnotes to describe their daily experiences, but they
also rely on guided observations, surveys, maps, and reviews of written
records such as newspapers, parish records, or other archival data. Be-
cause participant observation emphasizes duration, breadth, and depth
of contact, it increases validity at the expense of reliability and gener-
alizability. That is, its strength is that it provides detailed information
from many different kinds of sources about a particular place. Whether
other observers would conclude the same things about that place, and
whether that place is really like many other places, remains untested in
most anthropological studies.
A. Developing Ethnographically Sensitive Vital Statistics: Measuring
Infant and Child Mortality in Brazil
Marilyn Nations has undertaken a series of innovative projects in Brazil
combining anthropology and epidemiology. One of these studies sought
to compare ofcial infant mortality rates with popular (unofcial) mean-
ings and experiences of infant death in the northeast region of Brazil,
which has among the highest infant mortality rates in the world (Na-
tions and Amaral 1991). The goals of this study were to measure death
accurately and to correct any apparent errors in ofcial population-level
measures of infant and child mortality.
The investigators undertook 118 interviews with parents of dead or
dying children in three poor rural communities. They observed heal-
ing ceremonies, child wakes, funerals, and burials. They learned that
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Introduction 77
deaths in Brazil only get counted in ofcial statistics when registered at
government-authorized sites. But this process often necessitates multiple
trips to a capital city and requires the services of a doctor to ascertain the
cause of death. Parents are offered incentives to register a childs birth but
disincentives to register a death: although registering a childs birth can
lead to benets such as milk and food supplements, school enrollment,
voting, and health care, registering a childs death can incur penalties such
as losing food supplements. Not surprisingly, births tend to be registered,
but death registry is comparatively incomplete.
The anthropologists also studied the types of rituals involved in the dy-
ing process and the community members involved in those rituals. They
used their data to develop a network of people who had inside knowl-
edge of infant and child deaths: grave diggers, cofn makers, indigenous
midwives, undertakers, priests, and the like. They then trained these peo-
ple to detect and record infant and child deaths in one town, and they
compared over 12 months the number of deaths detected by these pop-
ular death reporters to those ofcially registered and to those found in
a census of all households with children under age ve. Nine deaths of
children under ve were reported from all these sources put together: the
popular reporters identied eight of them; the survey six, and the ofcial
registry only four. The sources assembled through anthropological eld-
work provided more accurate counts of infant and child deaths than the
ofcial registry or a household survey. The authors conclude that they
have painted a picture of infant and child death that is more nuanced
and valid than the cold and incomplete numbers provided by the state or
national government.
And what do epidemiologists do to increase the accuracy of their
measurements? They increase accuracy by relying on large random sam-
ples, standard (pretested) measurement scales, and tested survey ques-
tions. These methods improve reliability and generalizability, sometimes
at the expense of validity. That is, epidemiologists focus on the likelihood
that another researcher would nd the same results that they did, and
that the site under study is a good example of other sites like it. But be-
cause of unexamined assumptions and the popularity of particular types
of variables at particular times, the validity and accuracy of epidemiologic
measures may not always be just what epidemiologists intend them to be.
How do epidemiologists and anthropologists design research to obtain
valid and reliable data? Epidemiologists divide their studies into experi-
mental and observational designs. Experimental designs involve some type
of purposive and measured intervention on the part of the researcher,
whereas observational designs involve data collection without researcher
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intervention. Observational studies are calleddescriptive if they present the
overall distribution of disease in a population, and analytic if they explain
observed patterns in terms of proposed causal or etiologic factors. Ob-
servation and description also are essential parts of any anthropological
study, but few anthropologists would describe intervention and experi-
ment as appropriate objectives. By participating in the daily activities of a
given group over time, anthropologists believe they come to understand
what it means to be a member of that group. Anthropologists are thus
likely to be able to compile more intimate and comprehensive pictures of
daily life than could be obtained by a complete outsider.
One way to try to resolve some of the differences between epidemiolog-
ical and anthropological forms of observation has been to create interview
tools that combine descriptive narrative accounts of local concepts of ill-
ness with systematic coding and analysis. One such tool called the EMIC
(Explanatory Model InterviewCatalogue) was developed primarily to fa-
cilitate the study of local concepts of mental health (Weiss 2001). The
EMIC uses a combination of open-ended and closed-ended questions,
so that respondent categories unknown to a researcher can be uncovered
and measured, but so also can measures of the frequency and causes of
categories presented by researchers.
Anthropology and epidemiology are typically thought to involve dra-
matically different analytic processes, but there is actually a great deal
of similarity between them. One traditional approach to anthropologi-
cal analysis has been described as follows: the anthropologist commonly
nds a behavior pattern in the multiple singular acts of particular in-
dividuals, then creates abstract roles and relationships from those pat-
terns, and then seeks or proposes principles that can account for those
roles and relationships (Nadel 1957). Epidemiologists also generalize
about the behavior of individuals when they construct measures of ex-
posure. They nd disease patterns in data aggregated across multiple
individuals, and they seek or propose principles that can account for
those patterns. Anthropologists sometimes seemto forget that expanding
from a unique individual utterance or action to a more general descrip-
tion of group context requires an act of descriptive abstraction. On the
other hand, epidemiologists sometimes seem to forget that categorizing
risk factors or choosing measures requires qualitative judgment. Thus
descriptive abstraction occurs in both epidemiology and anthropology,
although epidemiologists commonly seek and describe their abstracted
patterns of disease using quantitative descriptions built from a statistical
vocabulary, whereas anthropologists more often present their abstracted
patterns of culture using qualitative descriptions built from an everyday
vocabulary.
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Bias in Epidemiology and Its Anthropological Counterparts 79
II. Bias in Epidemiology and Its
Anthropological Counterparts
Bias, or systematic error, is a critical concept in epidemiologic research.
Bias is a threat to validity that cannot be resolved through additional
analysis. Bias may inate or minimize estimates, but if results are bi-
ased, then no amount of analysis will uncover the true values. Epidemi-
ologists have classied as many as 35 different types of bias (Sackett
1979), but anthropologists reviewing the list will recognize many famil-
iar research topics. For example, epidemiologists dene selection bias
as errors arising from systematic differences between people who are
selected versus excluded from a study, and referral lter bias as the
increasing concentration of rare and severe conditions as ill patients are
referred from primary to secondary to tertiary care. Both of these can
be related to what anthropologists and sociologists call health-seeking
behavior, namely the strategies people use to decide what ails them and
how to cure their symptoms (Chrisman 1977). The next section com-
pares epidemiologic and anthropologic models of the health care-seeking
process.
A. Selection Bias and the Ecology of Medical Care
In 1961 the New England Journal of Medicine published a diagram (Fig-
ure 4.2) that described the hierarchy of seeking medical attention in
the United States. The diagram appropriately noted the differences be-
tween the rate of adults who reported illnesses or injuries in a month
(750 per 1000 population) and the proportion who consulted a physi-
cian (250/1000), who were admitted to a hospital (9/1000), and who
were referred to a university medical center (1/1000). But this analysis
represented only the formal health system, which provides only a lim-
ited portion of all health care. The formal health-care system refers to
government-sanctioned providers of care, almost always licensed practi-
tioners such as doctors and nurses. Kerr White, the author of the diagram,
himself noted later (1997:17) that it would be important to classify how
the general public describes its illnesses and health-related concerns, and
when and why it seeks care. This would include care from formal and
informal or popular providers ranging from physicians to chiropractors
to megavitamin therapists, and anthropologists would push beyond that
to include care from parents, neighbors, priests, co-workers, and other
sources of health-related advice and treatment.
Just such a revised picture of the use and sources of health care in
the United States as a whole was created in 2001 (Green et al. 2001,
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Figure 4.2. Monthly prevalence estimates of illness in the community
and the roles of physicians, hospitals, and university medical centers in
the provision of medical care (adults 16 years of age and over). From
White et al. 1961:890. Copyright

1961 Massachusetts Medical Soci-
ety. All rights reserved.
see Figure 4.3). This analysis included both children and adults, and it
described both biomedical and alternative sources of professional care.
(It did not extend to nonprofessional care from sources such as neigh-
bors, relatives, or co-workers.) The numbers were quite similar to the
prior picture: 800 per 1000 reported symptoms in a month, 217 per
1000 visited a physician, 8 per 1000 were hospitalized, and fewer than 1
per 1000 were admitted to a university hospital. But, in addition, this
analysis reported that 65 per 1000 visited alternative practitioners of
various types, 34 per 1000 visited outpatient clinics or emergency de-
partments, and 14 per 1000 received home health care. The proportion
of patients in university hospitals and medical centers is very small in
both analyses, although these are the patients about whom most medical
literature is written.
Because so many studies of health conditions are undertaken in aca-
demic hospitals and medical centers, White and colleagues cautioned
readers to be careful in generalizing from such studies to the general
population. The article reminded readers that this distribution meant
serious questions can be raised about the nature of the average medical
students experience, and perhaps that of some of his clinical teachers,
with the substantive problems of health and disease in the community
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Figure 4.3. Results of a reanalysis of the monthly prevalence of illness in
the community and the roles of various sources of health care. Each box
represents a subgroup of the largest box, which comprises 1000 persons.
Data are for persons of all ages. FromGreen et al. 2001:2022. Copyright

2001 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved.
(White et al. 1961:891). In other words, many doctors know a lot about
disease but not as much about people. But it also is useful to consider
how this diagram of the ecology of care would vary from place to place
across the world in the number of symptoms recorded, the variety of
sources of health care used, and the proportions of people using different
systems of care. What is the real versus the reported number of ill-
nesses and injuries in different countries? How large a proportion of the
population is cared for by physicians versus traditional healers? What are
the implications of this for where studies are undertaken? How should we
interpret the results of published studies from academic medical centers
in contexts where such centers treat only minuscule proportions of the
population?
Some research groups already are beginning to combine anthropo-
logical and epidemiological methods to explore these types of ques-
tions. Take the case of Brazil, for example, which has the second highest
rate of births by caesarean section among 12 Latin American countries.
An interdisciplinary group in Brazil nested an exploratory ethnographic
study within a larger epidemiological study to understand why so many
women there sought unnecessary C-sections in hospitals (B ehague
et al. 2002). The epidemiologic study of 5304 women looked at all who
had given birth in hospitals in 1993; the ethnographic study selected 80 of
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these at random for more intensive interviewing and also interviewed
19 medical staff. The combination of these methods showed what the
authors called an interdependence of biological, institutional, and so-
cial variables, in which rich women were more likely than poor women to
receive C-sections, and poor women did things to pressure for C-sections
such as arriving at hospital early in labor, seeking obstetricians known to
do more C-sections, and requesting tests that might reveal a problem
justifying the procedure (B ehague et al. 2002:945). Attempts to prevent
or obtain relief for suffering have been described as health-seeking (or
help-seeking) behavior (Chrisman 1977). These strategies of Brazilian
women to obtain a desired C-section are exactly what anthropologists
would label help-seeking behavior.
B. Other Sources of Bias in Epidemiological Research
One potential bias in epidemiologic studies based on interview methods
is recall bias, dened by epidemiologists as systematic differences in
accuracy of memory. For example, in a case-control study where all peo-
ple had the same exposure to potential cancer-causing chemicals, those
people who have cancer (the cases) may try harder and recall more past
exposure to chemicals than will those without cancer (the controls), thus
biasing the study results toward an association between chemicals and
cancer. Similarly, mothers of sick children may remember past events
quite differently from mothers of healthy children. Recall can be inu-
enced both by accuracy of memory and by changes in practice: those
who have been diagnosed with a disease may change their behavior after
diagnosis or treatment such that their recall of exposures is systematically
more or less accurate than that of controls.
This type of change in self-perception and adaptation to a diagnosis has
been studied more broadly in sociology as components of the sick role
in adaptation to illness (e.g., Parsons 1975). Anthropologists use the term
explanatory models to explain how people interpret their illnesses and
present them to healers (Kleinman et al. 1978). Thus the social science
literature on adaptation to and management of illness could serve as a
useful resource for better understanding causes and severities of recall
bias among different types of patients, and for different types of illnesses
and disabilities.
The validity of recall assessments depends partly on how much time
has elapsed since the event. Researchers have concluded that face-to-
face interviews are the best way to assess uncomplicated clinical events
and current or recent drug exposure, but medical records would be the
best way to assess more complicated medical events and drug exposures
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that occurred years before (Horwitz and Yu 1985). The U.S. National
Health Interview Survey (NHIS) researchers have conducted extensive
research on how long after an event one can expect valid reporting: they
have settled on a 14-day recall period for acute conditions and for health
service use, 30 days for psychiatric symptoms, and 90 days for other
chronic symptoms. Some conditions appear to make a larger impres-
sion and therefore last longer in memory: the NHIS asks about pain over
the past 3 months, health activity limitations and hospitalizations over the
past 12 months, and presence over a lifetime of certain chronic conditions
such as hypertension, asthma, and cancer (National Center for Health
Statistics 2001). The accuracy of reporting on health conditions is inu-
enced partly by the period of recall. This is because low-frequency events
are easier to forget and also because some events have greater impact on
ones life and are easier to remember.
Studies of the accuracy of recall have been done with elderly popula-
tions in the West, comparing their accounts of youth and childhood with
archival materials documenting their lives 50 years earlier (e.g., Berney
and Blane 1997). These and other studies show that most people recall
simple social and demographic information fairly accurately. Things such
as occupation, years of employment, and residence seem to be accurately
recalled by around 80% of respondents. Height and weight are recalled
with a little less accuracy. Tobacco use is recalled more accurately, but
food consumption is recalled quite inaccurately. So-called lifegrid meth-
ods can help create memory cues to social events like wars and strikes,
family events like births, deaths, and marriages, and personal events like
residence and occupational changes. Once these social, family, and per-
sonal events have been listed, the occurrence of other events can be lled
in and located temporally near the listed events (Berney and Lane 1997).
Methods such as these are commonly used to establish dates or other time
references in studies carried out in rural environments, especially those
where events and calendar time may not be linked as closely or recorded
as carefully as they are in European and North American environments
(Engle and Lumpkin 1992).
An additional source of bias in epidemiologic studies is nonresponse
or nonparticipation bias, dened as systematic differences in rates of
participation among study subjects. Although two decades ago it was
easy to reach potential respondents through phone surveys, today the
proliferation of devices like answering machines, cell phones, caller ID
services, multiple phone lines, and voice mail make it much more difcult
for researchers to locate their desired respondents. Even when located,
increasing proportions of people are refusing to participate in research
studies.
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This causes two problems: if those who respond are systematically dif-
ferent from those who do not, the representativeness and therefore gen-
eralizability of a studys results are greatly reduced. This problem arises,
for example, in the current debate over the privacy of medical records.
If people have the right to refuse to let their medical data be included
in large-scale epidemiologic surveys, those surveys become increasingly
less descriptive of the whole population. Population-wide calculations of
cancer rates and cancer types may be one early casualty of the new em-
phasis on patient consent: in Great Britain the quality of data in tumor
registries is threatened because people can now refuse to have their data
included in the database (Helliwell 2001). This reduces the usefulness of
the registry, which can no longer be considered a comprehensive source
of data about cancer in the population. Similar concerns have been raised
about how privacy rules inuence epidemiologic research in the United
States (e.g., Kulynych and Korn 2002).
The second problem of differential participation rates is of particular
interest to case-control studies in epidemiology. Case-control studies take
a group of people with a disease (cases) and compare their clinical history
or behavior to a group without disease (controls), in an effort to learn what
causes the disease. If participationrates ina study differ betweencases and
controls, this may bias results. When such differential nonparticipation is
related to the exposure of interest, bias is inevitable. This happened in a
study of cardiovascular risk: researchers were able to obtain some health
records for those who did not take part in the study, and they learned
that those who participated in the study had higher levels of risk but were
healthier than nonparticipants (Austin et al. 1994). This would cause risk
estimates from this study to be biased toward lower effects than would
have been visible had data from the less healthy nonparticipants been
included.
Although anthropologists have begun to study scientic research as a
form of patterned cultural behavior, they and others have only just begun
the ethnographic and interview research necessary to explain why study
participation rates are declining or why people might decide not to par-
ticipate in particular studies (see, e.g, Donovan et al. 2002). Of course,
nonresponse is a challenge in any research study, including an anthropo-
logical one. A better understanding of how people perceive science and
its measurement strategies would be useful to a broad range of health
disciplines that collect data through interviews and record reviews.
Epidemiologists devote signicant portions of their research to rec-
ognizing, labeling, and minimizing bias. Anthropologists use different
terms and denitions of bias, and explore its causes, sometimes to min-
imize it but other times to explain it. This example of how different
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Data Collection as Social Exchange 85
disciplines treat bias in health studies points out that the same phenom-
ena (e.g., incongruities between observed and reported behavior, or exis-
tence of varied pathways to health-care resources such as acupuncturists
and university hospitals) can be labeled, analyzed, and managed in quite
divergent ways.
III. Data Collection as Social Exchange
The process of collecting data is often a process of social exchange. This
means that conveying information from one person to another is done
in exchange for desired goods or services (like money, future patient
referrals, or authorship on articles) or some sentiment (like pride, loyalty,
duty, or altruism). The social exchanges between a doctor and a patient
in a hospital, or an interviewer and a person in her home, can be quite
different from those involved in acquiring access to particular computer
databases or hospital record systems. But they are still social exchanges:
people with different backgrounds, interests, and motivations are coming
together to communicate across these differences. It is easy but perilous
for health scientists, particularly epidemiologists, to forget this.
The social exchanges between interviewers and their respondents re-
semble familiar everyday social interactions in some respects. Some peo-
ple participate in surveys because they feel they need to. This motivation
is rapidly disappearing given informed consent and overload from mar-
ket surveys: residents of the United States appear increasingly unwilling
to participate in person-to-person interviews of any sort (Atrostic et al.
1999). Some participate in interviews because they hope to get something
from it: the pleasure of having someone really listen to their opinions, the
sense that they are helping others learn or benet from their knowledge
or condition, a way to ll up an otherwise dull day in a hospital or a
waiting room. No matter what their original motivation is, when they
participate in a survey, respondents react to the words and sentiments
of the interviewer. They may want to obscure or minimize characteris-
tics or practices deemed sensitive, such as household income or personal
hygiene; others such as sexual practices or consumption of illicit sub-
stances may be minimized in some contexts and exaggerated in others.
Respondents may also overemphasize qualities or practices that are val-
ued, like church attendance, time spent with family, or healthy behaviors
(Ross and Mirowsky 1984). At least where interviewing is a familiar form
of data collection, much of what takes place in an interview involves the
respondents attempts to gure out what the right answer would be
and to calibrate how to make the interviewer see them in a particular
(positive) light.
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Table 4.1. Comparison: Knowledge/Attitude/Practice (KAP) Survey versus
24-hour recall versus observation among 247 families in Bangladesh
KAP 24-h.
vs. vs.
Observ. Observ.
(# Discordant Assessments/# Comparisons between Methods)
Percent
Feces taken out of the home 21/58 20/58
36% 34%
Caretaker washes after defecating 37/95 14/98
39% 14%
Caretaker washes after touching feces 17/67 14/60
25% 23%
Source: Extracted from Tables 2 and 3 of Stanton et al. 1987:220.
A. Are Interviews the Best Way to Measure Sensitive Behaviors?
Asking about Hygiene Behaviors in Bangladesh
Astudy in rural Bangladesh was undertaken by an interdisciplinary group
including a physician, epidemiologist, anthropologist, and statistician
(Stanton et al. 1987). It was designed to compare the accuracy of ob-
servations, interviews, and 24-hour diaries as techniques to measure the
presence of sensitive hygiene practices so that the appropriate (most ef-
fective) method could be chosen. Mothers hygiene behaviors were ob-
served and coded by researchers, and those same behaviors were assessed
by personal interviews and recorded by mothers in diaries. Then specic
behaviors were compared across methods. Table 4.1 summarizes some
of the results.
The denominators in the results extracted show the total number of
instances where two methods gave information about the same behav-
ior, whereas the numerator shows the number of pairs for which the two
methods gave different (discordant) results. Thus the rst column, rst
row shows that for the behavior feces taken out of the home there
were 58 instances where data about this behavior could be compared be-
tween interviewand observation of mothers, and 21 of those comparisons
had interviews that gave one assessment of a behavior while observations
gave a different assessment. Thirty-six percent of the comparisons had
discordant assessments. Adiscordant result is one where a mother was ob-
served to take feces out of the home but did not report this at interview, or
she was observed not to take feces out of the home but reported doing so
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at interview. These hygiene behaviors seem fairly difcult to record with
any accuracy in an interview survey or guided recall of the past 24 hours,
which suggests that they can only be measured accurately using obser-
vations. But note that the relative accuracy of methods varies across
behavior: for feces taken out of the home the survey and 24-hour recall
were each inaccurate about one third of the time when compared with
observation. They were each inaccurate about one-quarter of the time
for caretaker washes after touching feces. But for caretaker washes af-
ter defecating the survey was inaccurate in almost 40% of comparisons,
whereas the 24-hour recall was inaccurate in 14%of comparisons. So un-
der some circumstances 24-hour recall might be an efcient alternative
to observation for this last category of behavior.
To try to reduce the measurement error caused by changes in the way
a question is asked or the context in which it is asked, researchers use
a standardized interview format. But this type of standardization can
interfere with the quality of the data collected. Two anthropologists an-
alyzed a series of survey interviews videotaped for research purposes by
the General Social Survey and the National Health Interview Survey re-
searchers. They wrote that the interview is a standardized procedure
that relies on, but also suppresses, crucial elements of ordinary conversa-
tion (Suchman and Jordan 1990). The presence of an interviewer and a
respondent in a survey interview implies that a conversation between two
people will take place, but many of the components of ordinary conver-
sation are not allowed to take place at all. For example, the survey format
gives the interviewer all control on speaking and topic, it standardizes the
presentation and content of questions by prohibiting redesign of ques-
tions by the interviewer, it places specic limits on the forms answers can
take, and it limits the interviewers ability either to detect or to repair
respondent misunderstandings. These analysts argue that the strategy of
standardization in interviews mistakes sameness of words for stability
of meaning (1990:233). They mean by this that the many strategies
to standardize interviews can create bored and impatient respondents
who censor their responses or fail to make themselves understood. They
suggest that research designers rethink how interviewer and respondent
work together during an interview, possibly by making interviews visually
available to both parties, and denitely by encouraging interviewers to
discuss meanings and to clarify their questions with respondents. One
of the commentators adds that it might make sense for interviewers and
respondents to complete a standardized interview or questionnaire fol-
lowing a lengthy conversation between them.
We face a paradox here: signicant amounts of research time are spent
trying to gure out how to increase response rates to interview requests.
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For example, the following questions have received research attention in
the United States in just the past few years: Do response rates go up if
interviewers are the same sex and ethnicity as respondents? [Yes.] Do
mail response rates go up if people are sent a token amount of money
along with a questionnaire? [Yes, by as much as 15%.] Do they go up if
an informational pamphlet about the study is sent to them along with the
questionnaire? [No, not at all.] Does quality of communication with study
participants inuence their willingness to stay in a long-term follow-up
study? [Yes, a great deal.] Does requesting biological specimens reduce
peoples willingness to participate? [Only a little.] Do people generally feel
positive about participating in epidemiologic studies? [Yes, they feel they
are adding to human knowledge and helping to prevent disease, although
some have qualms about providing personal information.] Yet despite
these efforts to increase respondent participation and understand moti-
vations and causes of nonparticipation, the actual process of collecting
the data still poses signicant impediments to uid and easy communi-
cation. This is one argument for using more ethnographic techniques to
accompany standard interview practices.
B. Sensitivity of Topic and of Interviewer Inuence on Respondent
Accuracy: The World Fertility Survey in Nepal
Two anthropologists wanted to understand whether women in rural
Nepal responded differently to sensitive questions from an outside inter-
viewer working for the World Fertility Survey than they did to sensitive
questions from an ethnographer who had lived in their midst for one year
(Stone and Campbell 1984). The anthropologists did the comparison,
and they found that women did respond differently. The ethnographers
concluded that the World Fertility Survey was fully or partly unintel-
ligible to 80% of the respondents. For example, women interpreted a
question about whether they had heard of abortion as a question about
whether they themselves had had an abortion; they interpreted a ques-
tion about whether they knew where to go to get family planning services
as asking whether they themselves went to get those services there. The
ethnographers concluded that women knew far more about family plan-
ning services than the survey suggested.
But not all information on the World Fertility Survey was equally
sensitive, and a portion of the sensitive questions still yielded accurate
answers: although contraception was sensitive and private and yielded in-
accurate data, information about deaths of children and fertility history
was sensitive but not private and yielded accurate information. This is
attributable partly to the context of the World Fertility Survey interviews
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themselves: rather than being undertaken in a private area, both inter-
viewer and respondent were surrounded by curious onlookers, and seem-
ingly private events were held up to public scrutiny. It seems that the
World Fertility Survey designers did not imagine that this social context
would surround data collection, or they did not think it would be a hin-
drance. They could have done the work required to understand what the
social context of the interview would be like. They also could have done
the eldwork required to understand which topics were likely to be sen-
sitive and to yield inaccurate information. Their failure to do so resulted
in statistically reasonable but invalid results.
It isnt only survey respondents who try to inuence how data will
appear: researchers also participate in social exchanges that inuence
their use of their data, and they also have beliefs about what consti-
tutes a correct answer. Scientists developed the double blind strat-
egy (which masks the identity of a study group both to participants and
to the research team) because they learned that researchers also make
both subtle and crude attempts to inuence study outcomes (see Day
and Altman 2000). The range of researcher inuence goes from subtle
and unconscious changes in question content or searching some hospital
records more carefully than others to outright faking of lab reports and
painting false colors on mouse fur. And it extends also to data analy-
sis. One story I have heard in various versions concerns a statistician
who wanted to show his collaborators the force of their prior expec-
tations. He showed them a graph that displayed the results they sup-
ported and asked them to review why this happened. They readily did
so. Then he confessed that he had mislabeled the graphs, and the data
actually showed results opposite to their expectations. At this point a few
of his collaborators refused to accept the results, even though they had
supported the methods when those results appeared to agree with their
expectations.
Data collectors in the eld also inuence data quality and accuracy.
Here, too, the concept of data collection as social exchange can help ex-
plain systematic errors. Another bias identied by epidemiologists and
other designers of surveys is called interviewer bias, where specic
types of interviewers differentially question and probe different types of
respondents. A related bias in such exchanges is that of reporting bias,
where respondents are differentially willing to reveal sensitive informa-
tion about themselves to different types of interviewers. For example,
male interviewers produce less accurate information from respondents
(both male and female) than do female interviewers, and White in-
terviewers in the United States produce less accurate information about
non-Whites. The ideal interviewer for most household surveys in the
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United States seems to be a middle-aged woman matched to respondents
by ethnicity and primary language.
Sometimes data collectors seek to inuence outcomes; other times they
seek to maximize income while minimizing work. Survey researchers have
to build in various cross-check and validation procedures to make sure
that interviewers are not sitting under a tree or in a coffee shop making
up data themselves. Though the following quote concerns surveys in
developing countries, it is also potentially relevant for interviews in the
United States:
We have devised the following descriptive denition: A rural Third World Survey
is the careful collection, tabulation, and analysis of wild guesses, half-truths, and
outright lies meticulously recorded by gullible outsiders during interviews with
suspicious, intimidated, but outwardly compliant villagers. (Chen and Murray
1976:241)
Examples of social exchange to this point have been concerned primar-
ily with exchanges between individuals rather than organizations. But the
theme of exchange also is relevant to organizations and teams. It takes
another form when researchers have to change their research designs
to gain access to particular types of patients or types of research envi-
ronments. This is especially true for epidemiological and social science
researchers who do not provide patient care, since they must somehow
obtain access to records or human respondents. Almost any social sci-
ence researcher who has had to obtain permission to work with a group
of patients can tell stories about how the study design changed in the
process of negotiating or maintaining that access to patients. For exam-
ple, DiGiacomos efforts to participate in an epidemiological study of
diagnostic delays in cancer were repeatedly frustrated by her colleagues
(1999:438). Timmermans (1995) was forced to stop his observational
study of resuscitation efforts in a hospital emergency room eight months
early, and he also was compelled to invest considerable time in forming
political alliances, exploring legal options and negotiating with the hospi-
tals Institutional Review Board (IRB). The hospital IRB was promoting
a particular vision of quality scientic research that did not respect qual-
itative data, and it protected the reputation of its parent institution and
the medical profession more generally in the face of what it interpreted
as unfounded criticism. And Caspers study of fetal surgery (1997) was
shut down early when surgeons uncomfortable with her politics refused
her further access to their patients. These are just a few examples of the
ways that organizations inuence the methods and ndings of both staff
and guest researchers.
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Data Collection and Human Attention 91
IV. Data Collection and the Challenges of Human Attention
Not all measurement error can be attributed to respondent or inter-
viewer manipulation, or to what sociologist Erving Goffman aptly called
the presentation of self in everyday life. Humans simply do not mea-
sure some things very well, and their memory of incidents, dates, and
faces often is exaggerated. The most public example of this problem can
be seen in the controversies over the accuracy of eyewitness identica-
tions of criminals when these were later compared with DNA analyses. A
high proportion of people exonerated with DNAevidence were convicted
through faulty eyewitness testimony (Wells et al. 1998). Another example
is the major scandal over the recovered memories of supposed victims
of sex crimes and satanic abuse (see Pezdek and Banks 1996). In these
cases people were sometimes jailed 20 years after memories of childhood
crimes were remembered by their supposed victims. While not all the ac-
cusations were false, the majority apparently were, and their unmasking
served to reduce prior levels of condence in the accuracy and truth of
memory.
But human weaknesses are not always as dramatic as false identication
of criminals or false memories of satanic rapists they also extend to more
mundane memories of appointments and accidents, and to self-reported
health and functioning as well as that reported for other members of the
household. The following example shows that such differential reporting
extends even to something seemingly as unambiguous as male circumci-
sion status.
A. Sensitivity of Topic, Understanding of Question, and Biomedical
versus Public Standards: Are You Circumcised?
It seems improbable that something as obvious as circumcision status
could be subject to interpretation. Yet as part of a study of the relationship
of circumcision status to female cervical cancer, researchers in New York
decided to check whether self-report of circumcision was accurate. It
was not.
Male study participants and physician examiners agreed on circum-
cision status in only 65% of the comparisons (Table 4.2). Fully one-
quarter of participants stated they were not circumcised when physicians
thought they were, and 10% of participants said they were circumcised
when physicians thought they were not. Such differences could arise from
differing assessments between professionals and laypersons about how
much foreskin must be removed to warrant the label circumcised. It
is possible, of course, that a high proportion of those men who reported
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Table 4.2. Circumcision status reported by patient and physician
Patient Self-report
Yes % No % Total
Medical exam Yes 37 (19%) 47 (25%) 84
No 19 (10%) 89 (46%) 108
Total 56 136 192
Source: Lilienfeld and Graham 1958:715.
themselves as circumcised, despite lack of conrmation from medical
exam, actually did undergo a religious or hospital-based circumcision,
even if the physical evidence does not conrm this. It is also possible
that those who reported not being circumcised, when physicians thought
they were, had forgotten or did not know they had been subjected to the
procedure, or simply did not know what the word meant.
This type of disagreement between sources illustrates the validity of
diagnostic tests. If we were interested in knowing, for example, what
percent of people who really were circumcised identied themselves as
circumcised; we would be inquiring about the sensitivity of respondent
self-report, that is, the percentage of people who really have a character-
istic who are classied as having that characteristic. In this case, if we take
medical exam as the gold standard, then the sensitivity of respondent
self-report is 37 out of 84, or 44%. That isnt very high if we want sen-
sitive tests to identify cases correctly. The specicity of self-report refers
to those who really do not have the characteristic and who are classied
correctly. Here the specicity of self-report would be 89 out of 108, or
82%. Specicity is an important quality of screening tests designed to
rule out particular conditions or to correctly identify those free from a
sickness or condition.
One more layer of complexity should be added to this analysis: calling
the medical exam the gold standard may be appropriate when circumci-
sion is seen as an action with physical results, but not if we were evaluating
it as a cultural category. In the case of cervical cancer, circumcision status
matters because of the theory that risk comes from exposure to infection
or other contamination from the foreskin. But meaning can be just as
important as foreskin length for some health purposes. Under these cir-
cumstances circumcision status may be better assessed by self-report than
physical exam. The question of whether physical examor self-report is the
best measurement tool here depends on the causal connections assumed
in the research design. If circumcision status were being measured as an
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Social and Cultural Aspects of Clinical Trials 93
indicator of religiosity, for example, then respondent or parental report
of participation in a ceremony might be a more appropriate measure.
Some surveys rely on one person to report the health status of other
people in the household. Such people are called proxy reporters. When
husbands are asked to be proxy reporters for their wives reproductive his-
tories, they do a poor job (Fikree et al. 1993). In the United States, proxy
reporters tend to under-report disabilities in their households among per-
sons under 65 and over-report them for persons over 65. Because there
are so many more people under the age of 65 than over 65, researchers
have concluded that interview surveys may underestimate the number of
disabled people in the United States by more than 1.6 million (Todorov
and Kirchner 2000).
Excessive reliance on spoken words in interviews can lead researchers
to categorize respondents and measure behaviors incorrectly. Reliance
on records of such interviews can cause similar errors. Some classes of
information can be collected easily through interviews, but others must
be obtained through more expensive and time-consuming methods of
observation, diary, or other forms of interaction and collection. For this
reason, ethnographic projects like those described earlier in this chap-
ter are often useful precursors to interview-based data collection studies.
They can help to predict which types of questions are likely to be sen-
sitive and which methods can be used to obtain sensitive information
accurately. To obtain valid and reliable results, some research topics will
require the use of ethnographic methods to complement interviewsurvey
methods.
V. Social and Cultural Aspects of Clinical Trials
as a Form of Data Collection
Measurement techniques inuence the quality and type of data collected.
But the overall form and sequence of all the measurement techniques
used in a study, the design, also is critical. Some epidemiologic designs,
because of their complexity, cost, and popularity, are particularly subject
to social and cultural inuences. One particularly clear picture of this
can be seen in the case of industrial sponsorship of clinical studies, es-
pecially clinical trials. In exchange for the extensive funds or specialized
substances they need to perform their research, investigators have been
asked to use research designs developed by sponsors or to sign contracts
that give their sponsors the right to review and censor manuscript drafts
in advance of publication. In the most egregious cases, this has resulted
in companies denying researchers the right to publish papers that report
their therapies as having detrimental, nonexistent, or slight therapeutic
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effects (Blumenthal et al. 1997). This type of agreement is a contractual
form of social exchange because the company demands the right of rst
reviewof manuscripts in exchange for its nancial or other support. Medi-
cal journal editors have become sufciently concerned about this practice
that they have tightened their requirements and requested more informa-
tion from authors during the review process. (See, e.g., a summary of the
concerns of 10 medical journal editors, in Davidoff et al. 2001.) Again,
although this kind of agreement is most criticized for its limitations on
publication, it also can have dramatic effects on the types of data collec-
tion techniques that epidemiologists and other researchers are allowed
to use.
In a world of false starts, innovative but incorrect hunches, and abun-
dant possible therapies, one should see many more published reports of
failed studies than of successful ones. But journals showthe reverse: many
more studies are published that report signicant results and successful
trials. This raises yet another type of bias in epidemiology that has social
and cultural overtones: one named publication bias. Publication bias
describes this propensity of researchers to submit and journals to publish
primarily those studies that have positive (statistically signicant) results.
Researchers, journals, and the pharmaceutical companies that sponsor
signicant numbers of clinical trials focus on success, on innovation, and
on promising leads more than they focus on failure to reject the null hy-
pothesis. But if there is some tendency not to publish negative or incon-
clusive studies, then meta-analyses (which analyze data combined from
multiple studies) will be biased toward positive reports. A study designed
to assess the magnitude of this problem among research sponsored by
pharmaceutical companies found a high frequency of duplicate publica-
tion, sometimes with no author name used in common across duplicate
publications (Melander et al. 2003). It also found that research studies
were three times more likely to be published if the results favored a new
drug than if they did not, and that published studies tended to emphasize
analyses most favorable to the experimental drug. They conclude that
for anyone who relies on published data alone to choose a specic drug,
our results should be a cause for concern (2003:1174).
Concern about publication bias is one force pushing researchers toward
disseminating their results especially negative ones over the Internet.
It is another instance of how new technology changes the research envi-
ronment. But even if this technology does allow a broader range of statis-
tically signicant and nonsignicant results to be located and included in
meta-analyses, how many people take the time to read the inconclusive
studies, and how often do inconclusive or negative results make their way
into the media?
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Cultural and social considerations affect data collection about disease
risks and health outcomes in myriad other, often subtle or unrecognized,
ways. For example, interdisciplinary studies are currently more difcult
to publish than discipline-specic ones, since the number of capable re-
viewers and interested journals is still relatively low. And getting a new
journal listed in the large and frequently used electronic databases, such
as MEDLINE/PubMed or Current Contents, is a long and difcult pro-
cess. Some disciplinary journals face hurdles in proving their legitimacy
to a biomedical audience, and so also do journals published outside of
industrialized countries (Gibbs 1995, Trostle 2000).
Who is available for study, how accurately respondents reply to ques-
tions, how answers are categorized and presented all these describe
additional inuences of culture and society on the construction and col-
lection of data.
FOR FURTHER READING
Bernard H. R., ed. 1998. Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology. Walnut
Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Metcalf P. 2002. They Lie, We Lie: Getting on with Anthropology. London:
Routledge.
Porter T. M. 1995. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public
Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Sackett D. L. 1979. Bias in analytic research. Journal of Chronic Diseases 32:5163.
Schensul J. J. and M. D. LeCompte, eds. 1999. The Ethnographers Toolkit.
Vol. 17. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
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5 Anthropological Contributions
to the Study of Cholera
Those with power were expected to take action against cholera. Those
without power were the likely victims. Each had a choice of action,
quarantine, cleansing, medical provision, prayer or just doing nothing
on the one hand, and ight, anger, alarm, obedience to regulations, or
just doing nothing on the other. Values emerged in choices between life
and property, between work and safety, between charitable action and
government agencies.
(Morris 1976:1819, on the 1832 cholera epidemic in Britain)
Outbreak investigations are a classic method in epidemiology; they have
determined the causes of new epidemics such as Legionnaires disease,
Hanta virus, Ebola virus, SARS, and E. coli O157:H7. An outbreak inves-
tigation is designed primarily to identify the sources of unusual diseases or
unusual numbers of cases of disease, as well as to prevent additional cases
(Reingold 1998). The steps in an epidemiological outbreak investigation
include nding cases, verifying diagnoses, and comparing rates with back-
ground expectations; interviewing both cases and controls about onset
and exposure; establishing causes; and developing measures of control.
Disease outbreaks are almost always newsworthy and a topic of great
public concern. The public reads many sensational tales of disease and
heroism, real and imagined, with titles like The Coming Plague, The Hot
Zone, Outbreak, The Demon in the Freezer, The Andromeda Strain, and
Plague Time. But there are other, somewhat less thrilling, stories to be
told about new pathogens. Outbreaks and the news they create also give
the public a chance to see culture being created and transmitted because
people invent behaviors and management strategies when they encounter
newdiseases. One small example of this occurred during the early days of
the Ebola virus outbreak in Kikwit, Uganda. Villagers who were deathly
afraid of contamination began to stop shaking hands and to start touch-
ing elbows in greeting, a gesture that became known as the Kikwit
handshake (Chiahemen 1995). A newspaper photo in 2002 showed
the captain of a cruise ship and a passenger greeting one another with
a similar formof elbowtouching. The ship was the site of a Norwalk virus
96
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Anthropological Contributions to the Study of Cholera 97
outbreak that caused 524 people to develop severe diarrhea (Gettleman
2002). Shaking hands in greeting became briey supplanted by touching
elbows as a polite way to greet one another without passing the pathogen.
Anthropological outbreak investigations go beyond registering the de-
velopment of newforms of salutation. In fact, an outbreak is an ideal mo-
ment for anthropologists and other social scientists to investigate disease:
the insult is recent and noticeable, and people are still responding to it,
revealing prejudices and assumptions about purity, pollution, and social
stratication. When groups under pressure decide who deserves attention
and care and who does not, or when groups choose which diseases merit
rapid intervention, outbreaks show a societys fault lines. They also show
how a society classies its pathologies: is gun-related violence and death
a public health or a criminal justice issue? Do we think about gun-related
deaths differently if we call them an epidemic? How about 700 deaths
in a Chicago heatwave in 1995? These were considered a natural disas-
ter until a sociologist showed howlack of electricity and air conditioning,
social isolation, and fear of opening windows in high-crime areas helped
create the high mortality (Klinenberg 2002).
The steps in an anthropological outbreak investigation include identi-
fying disease events worthy of study; collecting descriptions of an event;
comparing those descriptions with peoples expectations; and interview-
ing informants and collecting information from other sources about on-
set, exposure, help-seeking behavior, reactions, and interpretations of
what is happening. Not all of these steps are needed in all investigations;
some anthropological work might help identify disease event behaviors
(or behavioral constraints) unseen by other investigators. This informa-
tion then can be used to establish causes, describe or develop interven-
tions, and analyze the social and cultural responses to interventions. Some
anthropological outbreak investigations look like the discussions of con-
strained responses to the cholera epidemic described in the historical
excerpt that opens this chapter. Others resemble contemporary journal-
istic accounts of such actions. And still others take a closer and more
critical look at the categories and research methods developed to explain
the epidemic.
This chapter relates one such anthropological outbreak investigation
of cholera in Latin America in 1991, focusing on the epidemics cultural,
social, and political causes, as well as how professionals and laypersons
reacted to it. Because cholera is one type of diarrheal disease, the chapter
begins with the more general category. The rst section shows that when
ill health is seen as normal, this itself can inuence health service use and
disease epidemiology. Then the chapter examines the Latin American
cholera epidemic, which was both unexpected and widespread, showing
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98 Anthropological Contributions to the Study of Cholera
how an extraordinary illness can also inuence health service use and
epidemiology. I employ a model of natural history of disease that may be
familiar to clinical scientists, but I then link it to a series of cultural and
social inuences that render the model anything but natural. Fromthis
discussion emerges a sociocultural history of cholera that looks at howthe
outbreak inuenced, and was inuenced by, collective human attributes
and actions.
I. The Pervasiveness of Diarrhea: Implications
for Epidemiology
The body has a relatively limited range of responses to a much broader
range of diseases: fever, pain, vomiting, rash, seizures, difculty breath-
ing, and so forth. The term diarrheal disease describes one symptom
that can be produced by a number of causes ranging from viruses to bac-
teria, parasites, malabsorption of lactose, or immune deciencies. And
diarrhea is no simple label. An extensive anthropological literature (e.g.,
Kendall 1990, Nichter 1993, Scrimshawand Hurtado 1988, Weiss 1988)
documents the broad variety of terms used to describe and categorize
diarrheal diseases around the world and efforts to use these terms in pre-
vention programs. Depending on the locale, caretakers pay attention to
and categorize diarrhea using color and form of stools, age of the child,
presence of a variety of supernatural causes, and other clues.
More than two and a half million children under the age of ve succumb
to diarrhea and dehydration each year (Kosek et al. 2003). Most cases of
diarrhea are of short duration, although they may recur multiple times.
Severe and extended bouts of diarrhea cause dehydration, which can, and
does, kill with surprising speed. It is among the top two or three causes of
infant and child mortality in most developing countries. Diarrhea largely
attacks the young because weaned infants and children are more exposed
to fecal contamination and less likely to have developed effective immune
system responses. Epidemiologists commonly divide diarrhea into acute
cases consisting of three or more loose watery stools in less than 24 hours,
and persistent cases lasting for 14 days or more. Persistent diarrhea causes
more than half of all deaths from diarrhea in many developing countries
(Victora et al. 1993).
Although these facts about diarrhea present a fairly monolithic descrip-
tion, measurement of diarrhea is subject to a range of social and cultural
inuences. In the case of diarrheal diseases, accurate estimates of symp-
toms need to rely on maternal recall because most diarrheal diseases tend
to occur among those too young to give accurate reports, and mothers
are almost always the primary caretakers of sick family members. Reviews
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Implications for Epidemiology 99
of research studies have determined that mothers tend to overstate the
number of current or recent episodes of diarrhea slightly, whereas they
dramatically understate the number of events that occurred more than
two or three days in the past (Boerma et al. 1991). This has obvious
implications for study design. To be most accurate, epidemiologic stud-
ies ideally should inquire about diarrheal events occurring no more than
three days in the past. This means they must obtain information from
many people in order to nd recent cases of disease.
Patterns of health-service use make some epidemiologic classications
of diarrhea almost irrelevant to clinical intervention. For example, take
the case of persistent diarrhea, dened epidemiologically as diarrhea last-
ing more than 14 days. As noted earlier, this is the primary cause of
mortality from diarrhea in many countries. However, researchers in Peru
learned that 85% of cases of persistent diarrhea could not have beneted
from a standardized treatment offered by health-care providers because
a large majority of children with diarrhea had in fact been seen by health
providers within the rst few days of onset but did not return even if their
diarrhea lasted more than 14 days (Paredes et al. 1992). In this instance
the epidemiologic denition bears little resemblance to what mothers
care about. Anthropological studies of diarrhea have documented that
mothers are frightened by their childs discomfort, burdened by the time
needed to clean house and clothes, reluctant or unable to pay for expen-
sive care, and eager to nd some resolution (Bentley 1992). Additional
visits to a health-care provider are simply too expensive, and mothers
instead seek care from pharmacies, local healers, and neighbors. As a
consequence, the opportunity to identify and treat persistent diarrhea
can be lost.
Diagnosing acute diarrhea does not pose a challenge to most physi-
cians, but treating it does. Although patients (or their mothers) sim-
ply want the diarrhea to stop, physicians are trained to prevent or treat
the life-threatening dehydration that diarrhea causes. They could rec-
ommend oral rehydration solution (ORS), an inexpensive solution of
water, salt, sugar, and potassium. But because the ORS formulation
usually recommended by the World Health Organization does not halt
the frequency or severity of diarrhea, dissatised patients sometimes de-
mand stronger medicines that they think will offer immediate results
(Kendall 1990). Physicians in many developing countries commonly
prescribe expensive antibacterial and antidiarrheal medications rather
than ORS to treat diarrhea, even though such medications are needed
only in 10% of cases (Trostle 1996). In this example, doctors and pa-
tients often agree that the unpleasant symptoms of diarrhea warrant the
more aggressive and expensive treatments, even when international health
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experts insist that ORS alone is sufcient to prevent most child mortal-
ity. While this conict is described in greater detail in Chapter 6, here
we need only acknowledge that the international standard for treating
diarrhea involves asking doctors to stop prescribing the drugs they and
their patients want, substituting instead a substance that does not give
them the symptom relief they think they need. In this sense, physicians
and patients alike are strongly inuenced by the characteristics of the
disease.
As mentioned earlier, diarrhea is divided into a large number of non-
biomedical categories and is treated with diverse resources. Epidemiolo-
gists seeking accurate measures of the incidence or prevalence of diarrheal
disease must take account of these popular categories or risk ignoring
substantial proportions of perceived morbidity (Nations 1986). In some
places diarrhea is taken as a normal sign of growth and development.
So-called teething diarrhea, for example, is associated with tooth erup-
tion because it often occurs at this stage of a childs physical development
(Ene-Obong et al. 2000). Parents commonly do not link diarrhea to the
changes in diet that occur when childrens teeth emerge, nor with the
increasing possibility of contamination associated with childrens ability
to move around on their own beginning at this age. The biomedical con-
ception of diarrhea is not commonly understood among the populace
of many developing countries. Many international epidemiologic studies
have foundered when they assumed that survey respondents understood
and shared the biomedical classications of diarrhea used by the sur-
vey designers (Nations 1986, Yoder 1995). Because the condition is so
common, people do not always seek treatment from professional or even
biomedical caretakers, therefore surveys of diarrhea incidence or preva-
lence cannot be accurate if they are based only on patients who have
sought care from ofcial resources. And because local disease terminolo-
gies differ internationally from biomedical ones, and even in the United
States (Talley et al. 1994), considerable care must be exercised both to
understand how local groups dene diarrhea and to develop accurate
research designs to measure its incidence and prevalence.
II. Cholera: The So-Called Natural History
of a Diarrheal Disease
Cholera is a particularly virulent form of diarrheal disease caused by var-
ious biotypes of the bacterium Vibrio cholera. As opposed to persistent
diarrhea, cholera is an acute infection, of rapid onset and short dura-
tion. To understand the cholera infection process in individuals, and
to summarize that process for populations, epidemiologists commonly
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The So-Called Natural History of a Diarrheal Disease 101
Clinical disease Susceptibility Subclinical disease Recovery, disability, or death
Exposure Pathologic changes Symptom onset Usual time of diagnosis
Natural History of Disease
Figure 5.1. The natural history of disease. Redrawn from CDC
1992:43.
make reference to the natural history of disease. The model shown in
Figure 5.1 comes from an epidemiology textbook published by the U.S.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It portrays a sequence fa-
miliar to most clinicians and epidemiologists. The pointers above the
horizontal timeline mark events, moments critical to the progression of
disease in a body. The vertical marks below the timeline mark different
stages in the history of disease in individuals. Susceptible persons exposed
to a disease may undergo pathologic changes (called subclinical disease);
then may experience and perceive symptoms; obtain a diagnosis (clinical
disease); and get assistance and recover, become disabled, or die.
Applying this natural history model to the case of cholera, individu-
als most susceptible to infection are those who have not previously been
exposed to the V. cholera. In addition, O blood group or low stomach
acidity caused by malnutrition makes certain individuals more suscep-
tible to infection (Glass and Black 1992). People are usually exposed
to V. cholera through drinking contaminated water, although some types
of food may also carry the organism. Following ingestion in water or
food, the V. cholera organism adheres to the small bowel wall and secretes
a toxin. The toxin causes the intestinal cells to secrete water and elec-
trolytes into the intestine in sudden and massive quantities (Rabbani and
Greenough 1992). This is the onset of the pathologic changes caused by
the organism.
Clinical and epidemiologic studies show that 30 to 50% of those in-
fected with V. cholera never develop symptoms (Swerdlow et al. 1994,
Tacket et al. 1995). For those who do, the most visible symptom caused
by cholera is loss of body uids through diarrhea and vomiting. Of those
people who manifest symptoms, most have mild to moderate diarrhea
and vomiting. In about 10% of cases, however, the loss of body liquids
continues and becomes severe. This extensive uid loss causes eyes to
become sunken; skin to become hot, dry, and less elastic; and conscious-
ness to become dulled. If the body uids are not replaced through some
form of external rehydration, death from cholera can occur within days.
In very severe cases, death can arrive within 24 hours after the onset of
symptoms (Rabbani and Greenough 1992).
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Treatment of cholera includes oral rehydration or, in severe cases, in-
travenous rehydration, and administration of antibiotics. If rehydration
is successful, full recovery from cholera can take place within a day. But
while the human body is still infected, V. cholera is excreted in massive
quantities. Further contamination can result from contact with cholera-
laden sewer pipes, fromlatrines or sewage runoff fromhouses where peo-
ple with cholera are living, or, more rarely, through direct contact with
contaminated feces (e.g., in the process of changing bed linens or prepar-
ing a corpse for burial). During cholera epidemics, funerals themselves
are one frequent source of additional infections, as are other public cele-
brations where people may drink water from a source they do not know
is infected.
Following infection with cholera, people generally are immune to fur-
ther infection from that same biotype. For this reason, children are more
likely to contract cholera in endemic regions because adults have immu-
nity fromearlier exposure. When cholera is newly present, however, most
severe diarrhea in adults is likely to be caused by the disease.
This so-called natural history of disease actually incorporates quite
a few cultural and social elements that inuence disease progression
through time. Physical condition and economic hardship inuence sus-
ceptibility. Work, diet, water source, poverty, activity patterns, and resi-
dence inuence exposure to infectious agents. Once symptoms develop,
they may be labeled and perceived differently, and brought to public
attention at different levels of severity. There may be variation in who
diagnoses the condition and in who offers help (a neighbor, respected
elder, traditional healer, or doctor). Only some sick people come to the
attention of ofcial agencies of surveillance, and only some of those are
counted. Sick people belonging to different social groups have corre-
spondingly different levels of access to health services, and these health
services provide varying levels of quality of care. Some medical care will
be of sufcient quality and intensity to yield a successful resolution of
the disease episode, but other care might make people sicker. All these
sociocultural and contingent processes inuence and help to produce the
so-called natural stages this model describes.
Figure 5.1 described how disease progresses in an individual, and I
used it to explore how social and cultural processes inuence that pro-
gression. But one can also imagine a less familiar sociocultural history
of disease, applicable to an entire population rather than just one indi-
vidual. The sociologist Emile Durkheim, writing in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, proposed that social systems need to be
analyzed as such, not as collections of the grouped behavior of a set of
individuals. Let us look at cholera as it progresses through the population
at large.
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Cholera in Latin America 103
III. Cholera in Latin America: A Sociocultural
History of Disease
Cholera has spread to large portions of the world seven times since the
rst decade of the nineteenth century, in pervasive epidemics called pan-
demics. During the present seventh pandemic two major types of cholera
are circulating in the world, Classic and El Tor, each with different
levels of virulence (probability of infection given exposure). Cholera re-
turned to Latin America in the form of the El Tor type in January 1991;
the last previous epidemic on the South American continent had occurred
in 1895. By the end of 1995, ve years after the epidemic began in Peru,
more than 1.3 million cases and 11,000 deaths had been reported in Latin
America (Ackers et al. 1998). Cholera has become a major public health
threat in the region and is now considered endemic there, meaning a self-
sustaining epidemic. Capable of killing quickly and readily transmissible,
cholera inspires understandable fear among individuals, national govern-
ments, and international health authorities. It signies death and social
disruption, potential export declines, reduced travel and tourism, and
diversion of scarce health resources.
Cholera has both caused and symbolized similar social upheaval ever
since its rst identication as an epidemic disease in India in 1817. Dis-
eases represent ideas about danger and risk and hope as well as malfunc-
tioning physiology, and cholera is no exception. It menaced the British
Empire early in the nineteenth century because it crossed all the impor-
tant colonial boundaries of the time and caused them to be re-thought
(Bewell 1999). It manifested the dangers of the tropics, the poor, and
the unknown. It even showed the weakness of empire, since British com-
merce and troop movements themselves helped spread the disease. On
the other hand, cholera also provided a convenient rationale for distanc-
ing the otherness of a dirty India from the sanitary regimes of colonial
Europe (Prashad 1994). Instead of investing in fundamental infrastruc-
ture improvements to reduce the incidence of cholera and other diseases
among local populations in India, local administrators attempted to sepa-
rate sanitary foreign (colonial) neighborhoods fromlth-ridden na-
tive ones (Ibid.).
A disease especially full of meaning and metaphor, cholera provides
rich data for an anthropological analysis (see, e.g., Joralemon 1998 and
Briggs and Mantini-Briggs 2003). It can be analyzed as a well-adapted
bacterium, as a symptom of societal collapse, or as a conspiracy against
the poor (Joralemon 1998:33). Reading cholera as metaphor as well
as infection highlights the role of disease as an expression of society. As
explained in the paragraphs that follow, it can be wielded to blame victims,
offer a social critique, reposition identity, or change environments.
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Figure 5.2. Cholera threatens New York City. Life magazine, 1883.
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Sociocultural History of Disease
Recovery or recrimination
Exposure Epidemic onset Crisis recognition Intervention
Ecological susceptibility Care-seeking Individual & social risk
Figure 5.3. A sociocultural history of disease.
The cholera outbreak also provides us an opportunity to examine the
distribution and use of a societys resources. When it returned to Latin
America as a visitor froma prior century, it spread rapidly within poor ur-
ban neighborhoods and stigmatized populations. It was a grim reminder
and reection of the gross maldistribution of resources and limitations of
modernity. This also was the case in the cholera epidemics of the nine-
teenth century, as shown in Figure 5.2 in a drawing from an 1883 Life
magazine portraying cholera menacing New York City. The centurion
guard representing the health establishment is asleep at the dock, and he
is oblivious to the spectre looming up from across the water in London.
We can think of cholera as moving through groups of people over time
instead of through an individual body. The model shown in Figure 5.3 of
the sociocultural history of disease is applicable to an entire society. In this
diagram, pointers above the horizontal timeline refer to events critical
to the progression of disease in a population, whereas bars below the
timeline refer to different stages of disease in populations. We can apply
this model of the sociocultural history of disease to the case of cholera.
This population model requires that we consider how environments
themselves inuence susceptibility to disease. In an environment with
a well-chlorinated water system and intact water and sewer pipes, the
cholera agent meets a hostile reception and cannot spread. In another,
where aging water systems allow cross contamination between leaking
water and sewer pipes, cholera can ourish. This is why cholera was
common in the southern United States in the middle of the nineteenth
century, when open sewers ran down streets and buried water pipes had
plenty of cracks.
The risk of disease in a group exposed to a pathogenic agent also is
differentially distributed: even those with unhealthy individual habits may
never contract a disease like cholera if they live in clean environments;
those with healthy individual habits in polluted environments may still
become sick. This is the stage of a sociocultural history of disease that
I call individual and social risk. Risk is individual because motivations
matter. Although people are inuenced by history and context, some act
to reduce their risk of contracting the disease by chlorinating their water,
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while others do not. Some with the disease choose to get care for it, others
do not, and still others cannot. But risk is also social because some groups
are marginalized to unhealthy environments where their likelihood of
contracting cholera is systematically greater, and their ability to obtain
adequate health care is systematically lower.
Diseases get labeled as epidemics once they surpass a certain threshold
of known and accepted incidence. But governments usually do not assign
scarce resources to epidemics until a problem becomes a crisis, and not
all epidemics get labeled as crises. Some groups are important enough
to society that the appearance of illness among them will be noted and
attended to early. This happened, for example, during the epidemic of
poliomyelitis among school-age children in the United States in the 1930s
and 1940s, and in the early days of the anthrax attacks in the United
States in 2001, when members of Congress who received contaminated
letters got preventive treatment and decontamination before the postal
workers who handled the mail. Among a group ignored, forgotten, or
stigmatized, a disease may smolder for years before becoming labeled a
crisis. This happened with AIDS among gay men in San Francisco, and
it happens still with tuberculosis among the poor in many developing
countries (Farmer 1999). As we shall see later in this chapter, this issue
of who merits attention is particularly relevant for poor Latin Americans
susceptible to cholera.
Populations eventually develop organized responses to crises, as well
as specic interventions to reduce or eliminate the causes of the crises.
These usually consist of a combination of education, treatment, and some
related set of policy initiatives. In the case of cholera in Latin America,
interventions included educational campaigns about water chlorination
and handwashing, new legislation to control the food preparation prac-
tices of street vendors so that they would be less likely to transmit cholera,
and repairs to sewage and water lines.
After an intervention the population either suffers signicant losses and
blames incompetent leaders or malevolent gods, or it recovers and cele-
brates the victory. Cholera created a rapid revolving door for Ministers
of Health in Peru, where the 1991 epidemic started and was most vir-
ulent. Population losses there were consistently blamed on government
incompetence. In Mexico, brushed gently by the epidemic, the Secretary
of Health made cholera control a centerpiece of his long administration.
Here population health did not suffer, and the Secretary served his full
term.
Some authors have gone so far as to describe epidemics as forming a
plot line with four Acts: Act One consists of progressive revelation of the
disease, Act Two consists of agreement on an explanatory framework,
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Act Three a sense of crisis that elicits action, and Act Four a drift toward
closure (Lindenbaum2001:367, citing Rosenberg 1992). This is another
way to envision the types of changes that take place at the societal level
in response to a new disease.
In the rest of this chapter I will continue this anthropological outbreak
investigation of cholera in Latin America by asking three questions: rst,
why was Latin America a receptive environment for choleras return?
Second, what types of explanations were employed in the search for the
causes of cholera, and what types of prevention programs and government
responses did they engender? And nally, in what sense is this epidemic
an expression of society?
A. The Phase of Ecological Susceptibility: Why Did Cholera Return?
The cholera responsible for Latin Americas outbreak is said by some
to have been discharged from the bilges or ballast tanks of a freighter
that had previously visited other infected cities, possibly in Bangladesh
or China. This speculation may be true, but it just as clearly invokes a
classic script by labeling the disease as a foreign invader from the Ori-
ent. Whatever its origin, the cholera Vibrio contaminated plankton off
the coast of Peru. It grew well in water that was warmer than usual, per-
haps due to global warming (Epstein 1992) or changes in the El Ni no
ocean current. Then the organism infected carriers such as sh, mol-
lusks, and crustacea, and it was brought back by shermen into Peruvian
and Ecuadorian seaports. Unlike in the United States, where cholera has
periodically visited oil platform workers in the Gulf of Mexico over the
past decades but has never taken hold on the mainland (at least in the
twentieth century), cholera in Latin America encountered a deteriorat-
ing public infrastructure conducive to its growth. This phase of choleras
development can be called ecological susceptibility.
Human populations create environments hostile or conducive to differ-
ent types of diarrheal disease burdens and organisms. Environments char-
acterized by rapid urbanization, crowding, poor water supply, and poor
sanitation tend to have massive fecal contamination and therefore ram-
pant bacterial, viral, and protozoal pathogens causing diarrhea (Levine
and Levine 1994). Environments characterized by better housing, less
crowding, and good water and sanitation are sometimes also where com-
mercial food production and rapid transportation predominate. In these
environments there can be massive epidemics of diarrhea associated with
food standardization and distribution. Levine and Levine (1994) charac-
terize these as a developing world ecology versus an industrialized world
ecology, but they point out that although these ecologies sometimes can
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be equated with national borders, there is variability within countries
as well as between them. Developing countries have urban zones where
the industrialized world ecology can be found, and industrialized coun-
tries have some environments with the attributes of the developing world
ecology.
At the beginning of the cholera epidemic, most of Latin America could
be characterized as having environments with high pathogen loads. Peru
and Ecuador were in particularly perilous condition in the early 1990s.
For example, a $5.5 million U.S. development project to install 420 water
supply systems in Peru by the end of 1985 had completed only 10 and
had started 20 by 1983 (USGAO 1983). Peruvian citizens were caught
in a war between government soldiers and Shining Path guerrillas. One
analyst has commented, The processes leading to a cholera epidemic in
Peru in early 1991 are linked to decades of chronic ination that weaken a
societys life-preserving systems (Gall 1993:11). The country was suffer-
ing under hyperination that at one point raised prices by 7650% in one
year, and this was accompanied by a decline in gross domestic product,
reduction in per capita income, halving of public health expenditures,
declining access to drinking water, and population growth in periurban
slum communities (Gotuzzo et al. 1994).
Ecuador, Perus neighbor to the north, was just beginning a series of
structural adjustment programs to its economy imposed by the Interna-
tional Monetary Fund, following a decline in its oil revenues. New ser-
vices were nonexistent or sporadic; existing services also were decaying.
Without funds for extension or maintenance, the existing physical infra-
structure of sewers and water pipes crumbled in many Latin American
cities. In much of the region the institutional infrastructure of health-
care institutions and systems of public health surveillance and control
was under severe stress or was malfunctioning.
B. The Phase of Individual and Social Risk
1. :cascncs or nisk
Even if the population of Lima, Peru, lives in an environment susceptible
to infection by cholera, aspects of city life can either facilitate or inhibit
the spread of cholera once the population is exposed. Lima has wealthy
districts in the city center, but its rapid urbanization has largely been char-
acterized by the growth of urban slums called pueblos j ovenes or young
towns, often the result of coordinated land invasions by hundreds of
families. Areas of rock and sand are covered with shacks made of card-
board and scrap wood, and neighborhoods arise rapidly out of the desert.
These settlements initially have no piped water, no sewage systems, and
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no electrical service. Electricity is stolen from nearby power lines; water
is purchased from tanker trucks. If tankers bring contaminated water the
residents have no alternative.
Vulnerability of these neighborhoods to cholera is determined by both
institutional and individual capabilities: on one hand, vast numbers of
poor residents are given access only to polluted water; on the other hand,
some of those poor residents boil or chlorinate their water to reduce their
risk of infection. But epidemiologists tend to limit their denitions of
transmission pathways to factors suggested in the individual natural
history of disease model. These factors are primarily individual and
behavioral, not social or political. The larger social and political causes of
disease described in the previous sections do not tend to be perceived as
relevant components in the chain of cholera transmission, as summarized
in Table 5.1.
This table represents how researchers at the U.S. Centers for Dis-
ease Control and Prevention (CDC) described transmission mechanisms
for cholera in studies conducted during the rst few years of the Latin
American epidemic. These transmission mechanisms are specic and are,
in general, capable of being inuenced through health-related interven-
tions that emphasize proper behavior. With one possible exception, that
of drinking untreated water from a municipal system, all the specied
mechanisms are individual in nature and, at least in theory, subject to an
individuals control.
But at about the same time that the CDC researchers published this
comparison, a group of Latin American researchers (Gotuzzo et al.
1994:185) wrote that the damaged socioeconomic system that causes
extreme poverty was the rst of three principal causes of cholera in Peru.
(The others they mentioned were the frequency of the O blood group in
Peru and environmental factors such as increasing water temperatures of
El Ni no.) Cholera is a disease that primarily aficts the poor because of
their limited access to safe drinking water. But although this fact is known
to all, poverty was not commonly investigated by U.S. researchers as a
risk factor for cholera at the beginning of the Latin American epidemic.
Ten years after the Latin American epidemic began, a CDC fact sheet
on cholera stated that the risk group for cholera comprises [p]ersons
living in poverty in the developing world and that [e]pidemics [of
cholera] are a marker for poverty and lack of basic sanitation (CDC
2003). But these types of statements take poverty for granted. Poverty as
a marker can be taken for granted, assumed impossible to change, and yet
still used to justify quicker and shorter-term solutions. To call cholera a
marker of poverty is not the same as calling poverty a target for a cholera
intervention.
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Causal assumptions always focus andrestrict attention. Inthis instance,
looking at the causes of cholera as a set of specic individual behaviors
focuses attention on behavioral interventions at the level of the individ-
ual rather than the population. The public health interventions in Latin
America during the epidemic peak and afterward were targeted at the
transmission mechanisms listed by the CDC in Table 5.1: they were
consistently educational and personal, emphasizing behavioral change
by individuals more than environmental or economic modications by
society. Ministries of Health spent their resources training physicians to
treat cholera, and foreign governments donated supplies (antibiotics, in-
travenous rehydration solutions, laboratory supplies) and technical assis-
tance for training and education.
I visited Peru in 1991, 1992, 1993, and 1995, and I lived in Ecuador
with my family for six months in 1992 while I helped local scientists
in the region develop applied research proposals to study cholera and
diarrheal diseases. One popular billboard I saw all over the city of Quito
during the epidemic read, Lavar las manos es amor en los tiempos del
c olera or Handwashing is love in the time of cholera, a play on the
title of the popular novel by Gabriel Garca M arquez, Love in the Time
of Cholera, published in 1985, shortly before the epidemic. By choosing
this campaign slogan, the state emphasized not that social risk could be
lowered through the provision of clean water and sewer repairs, but that
personal risk could be lowered through handwashing. The implicit goals
of government-sponsored cholera interventions were reduction of fear,
case fatality rates, and political risks.
What types of data and analyses might be used to turn attention to
institutional vulnerabilities instead of individual behaviors? A group of
Ecuadorian epidemiologists (e.g., Breilh 1994) analyzed cholera as the
distinct result of poverty rather than of risky behaviors undertaken by
individuals. They used data from all municipalities in Ecuador to create
an index of deterioration and found that it correlated with cholera
incidence rates at the municipal level. Analyses like these take cholera as
the outcome of a set of social and cultural processes, and they study those
processes themselves in addition to studying the individual behaviors that
bring people in contact with infectious agents. They thus see economics
and politics as fundamental components of epidemiology. This approach
is variously labeled the political economy of health or critical medical
anthropology (Baer et al. 1997, Farmer 1993) in the United States, but
in Latin America it is part of a strong school of social medicine (Morgan
1998).
Examining social and cultural causes of disease at the population level
is part of the political economy of health. John McKinlay, a sociologist
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Table 5.2. Cumulative case
fatality rates (%) for countries
with more than 10,000
accumulated cholera cases,
January 1, 1991, to July 15, 1995
El Salvador 0.45
Peru 0.71
Brazil 1.07
Ecuador 1.14
Colombia 1.38
Guatemala 1.39
Mexico 1.42
Bolivia 1.98
Nicaragua 2.33
Source: Pan American Health Organiza-
tion 1995.
and political economist, has used a much-quoted metaphor to refer to
the difference between clinical and populational approaches to disease
(McKinlay 1974). A group of health scientists is standing next to a river
when drowning people begin oating by. The physicians jump in and
save them one by one, while the public health practitioner begins to run
away. How can you abandon these people? shout the physicians. The
public health practitioner shouts back, Im going upstream to nd out
who is pushing them in. In this instance, Breilh and many other Latin
American epidemiologists are asking society to refocus upstream on the
causes of cholera, rather than (or in addition to) pulling people out one
by one.
2. 1nc bcscnii1ioN aNb csc or 1nc casc ra1aLi1v na1c
Epidemiologic measurements themselves provide an example of institu-
tional strengths and vulnerabilities with respect to cholera. In this time
of rapid and ready transport and of available antibiotic and rehydration
therapy for cholera, a percentage of deaths among cases (the case fatal-
ity rate, or CFR) higher than 1.0% signals failures in the health system
(Global Task Force on Cholera Control 1993). CFRs above 1% suggest
that people are arriving at clinics too late in the clinical course or that pro-
fessional staff lack training or supplies to manage cholera well. Among
Latin American countries with more than 10,000 total cases (Table 5.2),
ofcial CFRs based on reported cases through 1995 ranged from 0.45%
in El Salvador to 2.33% in Nicaragua. Counting such deaths is a political
P1: JtR
as well as a scientic activity because having a high CFR may mean pay-
ing political costs for failure. Governments therefore have an incentive to
undercount cases, as the next section illustrates.
3. cocN1iNc cnoLcna ra1aLi1ics iN vcNczccLa
Political pressure on counting cholera fatalities was documented during
the cholera epidemic in Venezuela. Charles Briggs, a U.S. anthropolo-
gist, and Clara Mantini-Briggs, a Venezuelan physician, were in coastal
Venezuela for 15 months during 19941995 investigating cholera. Briggs
had conducted eldwork in the Orinoco Delta region of eastern Venezuela
for almost 10 years. At the time of the epidemic in 1992, Mantini-Briggs
was employed by the government as a physician and director of a rural
and indigenous health program.
Briggs and Mantini-Briggs traveled across the Delta visiting many small
communities and all the major population centers. They asked commu-
nity leaders for details about each death associatedwith cholera symptoms
between 1992 and 1993. Based on these interviews they estimated that
about 500 individuals out of a total population of 40,000 in the region
died in the outbreak. Most victims were classied by the government
as indigenous Warao, although Briggs points out that ethnic identity is
more uid and less discrete than this label would suggest (Briggs and
Mantini-Briggs 2003).
When cholera arrived in the Orinoco Delta, probably through infected
mollusks, it ourishedina regionlong neglectedby the State. The popula-
tion already suffered fromhigh rates of malnutrition and infant mortality,
limited medical services, and difcult transportation. Although cholera
had broken out in Peru more than a year earlier, the Venezuelan govern-
ment had made few efforts to teach rural residents about cholera, and it
had not distributed medicines or assigned the personnel that would be
required if the epidemic were to reach the region (Briggs 1999).
According to Briggs, the government sent many resources to the region
once the epidemic hit. But ofcials also deected blame away from gov-
ernment institutions and onto the cholera victims themselves (1999:6).
Cholera was depicted by the government and in the mass media as an
indigenous ethnic problem limited to this group, whereas cases that oc-
curred in mainstream society were rarely discussed. Individual behaviors
such as food preparation and unsanitary hygiene, and cultural attributes
such as food preferences and fatalismabout death, were labeled the causes
of the epidemic. The government and media neglected to mention the
systematic national neglect of indigenous regions, the economic crisis
and drop in oil revenues, or the poverty increases that had accompanied
structural adjustment programs. The government worked to contain the
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political threat with short-term measures rather than long-term changes
in health policies and infrastructural resources.
The impact of the epidemic was widespread and enduring. It could be
seen in massive out-migration from the Delta to nearby areas, a diminu-
tion of power among traditional healers who were impotent to stop the
epidemic, an increase in self-medication using prescription drugs, and an
increase in stigma attached to membership in the Warao group. Briggs
discovered this by studying not only the population at risk of contract-
ing cholera but also the public health practitioners who responded to the
epidemic and treated the sick.
The politics of counting cholera deaths were particularly obvious in
Venezuela, where the government wanted to avoid the critiques and loss
of prestige it would incur should CFRs climb much above the 1.0% that
would indicate health system failures. In 1992, the country ofcially re-
ported a national total of 2842 cholera cases and 68 deaths (a CFR of
2.4%) to the Pan American Health Organization. But Briggs reports that
the regional epidemiologist and the regional ofce of health for the Delta
counted 1701 cases and 49 deaths (CFR 2.8%) as of January 1993, then
later reduced this to 823 cases and 12 deaths (CFR1.5%) for all of 1992
1993. The regional epidemiologist faced national pressure to reduce the
total by including only certain cases: he was instructed to count only
cases for which a laboratory conrmation was available even though
no laboratory [equipped to process cholera samples] was available in the
state at the beginning of the epidemic and the tubes for taking sam-
ples were largely unavailable at the rural clinics in which most patients
were treated (Briggs 1999:20). This decision contravened international
guidelines, which specically state that [o]nce the presence of cholera
is conrmed [through laboratory tests], it is not necessary to examine
specimens from all cases or contacts (Global Task Force on Cholera
Control 1993:37).
Even looking only at the government surveillance system, the poli-
tics of counting is clearly evident. But the 10-fold difference between
the number of deaths estimated by Briggs and the number estimated by
the Venezuelan government should create additional speculation about
whose deaths get counted and why, and who gets blamed for being sick.
This and other instances of data suppression are documented in Briggs
and Mantini-Briggs (2003).
4. 1nc :caNiNcs or cnoLcna ra1aLi1v na1cs
Differences between national and regional estimates of cholera case fatal-
ity rates are one illustration of what Julio Frenk and colleagues in Mexico
have called an epidemiologic polarization (Frenk et al. 1991). The gap
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between wealthy and poor citizens is widening in most countries of the
world, such that rich areas in poor countries have health proles similar
to those of industrialized countries, such as high rates of cancer and car-
diovascular disease, whereas the poor suffer from parasitic and infectious
diseases more characteristic of underdevelopment.
Counting deaths becomes especially political for national governments
when the disparities between wealthy and impoverished regions are too
glaring, and where national rates hide signicant regional variation. The
regional variation in Venezuela was seen in many other Latin Ameri-
can countries. In both Ecuador and Peru, some poorer provinces had
CFRs more than twice as high over time as the national average. In
Ecuador, Chimborazo, a poor highland province with a high propor-
tion of Quechua-speaking indigenous groups, and Loja, a poor province
in the south of the country, both often had CFRs far above the national
average, as high as 8% during some outbreaks. Consistently higher CFRs
also were seen in Peru, in Mari ategui, a poor indigenous region in the
south, and the Nor Oriental del Mara non, a poor Amazon region. CFRs
above the national average appeared to endure over time, even when the
national average was far lower. For example, in 1991 the Epidemiologic
Surveillance Ofce of the Peruvian Ministry of Health compared CFRs
across different regions. Whereas the rate in the city of Lima was 0.25%,
it was 0.65% elsewhere on the coast, 3.72% in the Amazon basin, and
4.07% in the Andes. Two-thirds of the cases were in urban areas, but
the case fatality rate in rural areas was far higher than in urban areas
(Gotuzzo et al. 1994:188). It could be argued that the government was
providing poorer quality health services outside the cities, and especially
poor care to the indigenous populations in the Andes and the Amazon.
An average national measure of mortality masks, rather than reveals, this
regional variation.
A complete analysis of variability over time in cholera rates at the mu-
nicipal or provincial level would require collecting many data points over
time, compensating for regions with small numbers, and ascertaining
when high CFRs might represent the progress of the disease into new ar-
eas with low immunity. Consider what would happen if national progress
were not assessed with a single average CFR but rather with a measure
that would account for local variation. A CFR range might be one such
measure, consisting of the difference between highest and lowest state
or provincial CFR in any year. A coefcient of variation in provincial
CFRs would be even better, since it would summarize the amount of
data dispersion between individual provincial values and the mean value.
Or one might compare provincial performance over time, looking to see
how many provinces consistently had CFRs above the national mean, as
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a way of telling how an epidemic is managed by regional health systems.
Researchers could focus added attention on the extent of a countrys epi-
demiologic polarization, and whether this polarization is decreasing as the
country learns how to respond to the epidemic or whether some regions
continue to be systematically neglected over time. Expanding on the work
done by Gotuzzo et al. (1994) and by researchers who studied the distri-
bution of cholera across 32 Mexican states (Barroto and Martinez Piedra
2000), it would be interesting to divide entire Latin American countries
into distinct ecological or resource zones rather than political ones, and
then to combine case fatality rate data across countries, lumping regions
together not according to national boundary but rather by ecology, al-
titude, resources, literacy rates, or other features. This has the potential
to convey a more nuanced and accurate picture of the way cholera is
distributed and managed. With data at sufciently small levels of aggre-
gation, one could even begin to look at variation within regions (see Oths
1998).
C. Care-Seeking: How Health Institutions and the Populace
Responded to the Cholera Epidemic
Cholera created an atmosphere of fear and menace in Latin America.
Aside from the alarm about mortality itself, which was considerable,
countries justiably feared signicant losses from declines in tourism
and in agricultural exports. An economic study in 1993 estimated that
cholera cost Peru almost half a billion dollars. Almost half of this estimate
($233 million) included future earnings of those who died, but losses
from tourism alone were estimated at $147 million in 1991, exports lost
$23 million that year, and health services spent an added $29 million to
treat cholera cases. Income fromnewforeign sources of cholera assistance
was calculated at $11 million for 1991 (Petrera and Montoya 1993).
Despite the enormity of the sanitary challenge, the study estimated that
urban sanitation expenditures in Peru increased only $768,000 in 1991.
This was at a time when the Pan American Health Organization was
estimating that it would cost upward of $4 billion per year to bring water
and sanitation standards to acceptable levels in Latin America. Although
this was said to be impossibly high, it should be pointed out that the
countries of Latin America spent $19.3 billion on military expenditures
in 1992 and $21.9 billion in 1993 (SIPRI 2002). In 1995 Ecuador and
Peru alone found the resources to ght a border war that cost each nation
hundreds of millions of dollars, although no nal totals have been released
by the governments.
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How did health institutions and personnel react to the epidemic?
Cholera in Latin America was a disease of the past; it frightened health
personnel who had never seen a case and never imagined that they would.
When the epidemic rst began, physicians afraid of contagion treated
cholera patients with unnecessary precautions such as wearing gloves,
surgical masks, and gowns. I had the opportunity to offer technical as-
sistance to the Ecuadorian and Peruvian governments in the early days
of the epidemic, and I helped bring a group of cholera experts from
Bangladesh whose large international hospital, the International Centre
for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, had treated upward of 1000 cholera
patients a day. The Bangladeshis reported encountering signicant levels
of anxiety about cholera among clinical staff in Ecuador and Peru, so
they spent many seminars just trying to reassure and educate the staff. At
the beginning of their visit they created a stir simply by treating cholera
patients without wearing masks and gowns.
Saving lives was the rst priority of government, with cost and quality of
care secondary. The CFRs presented earlier, or at least their aggregates
at the national level, show that therapy was often successful in saving
lives. Yet case management for cholera was far from optimal in most
health institutions: the consensus of cholera experts is that many cases of
cholera managed successfully in hospitals never should have been admitted
in the rst place. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, only about 10%
of cholera patients are so sick that they need intravenous uids, whereas
the rest can be treated and released within a few hours or treated only
with oral rehydration therapy. A study in Ecuador (Hermida et al. 1994)
showed that almost half of hospitalized cholera patients could have been
managed at ambulatory centers instead. More than one-third of patients
were rehydrated with intravenous uids only, whereas fewer than 10%
required them. Another study in Ecuador estimated that about 45% of
cholera treatment costs in a sample of hospitals exceeded WHO norms,
with most of the excess caused by prolonged hospital stays, overuse of in-
travenous solution and antibiotics, and unnecessary laboratory tests and
physical examinations (Creamer et al. 1999). In Ecuador, and elsewhere,
patients sent home from hospitals with oral rehydration salts believed
they had been mistreated. They described ORS as nothing but a pack-
age of powder to mix with water. They demanded the more prestigious
and powerful (and expensive and time-consuming) intravenous solution
others had received.
Cholera also created perverse advantages. For example, the director
of a national diarrheal disease control program in one Latin American
country spoke ironically to me of the blessed arrival of cholera. His
program, and related activities in his Ministry of Health, received much
P1: JtR
more political attention, public prestige, and nancial attention during
the peak cholera years. Cholera treatment helped ll empty beds and
employ underutilized laboratories at a time when bed occupancy was a
critical component of future budget justications. A Peruvian historian
reported that [t]he epidemic helped re-establish hospitals as sources of
health care (Cueto 1997:198). Hospital administrators found that the
epidemic provided opportunities even as it brought danger and death.
One hospital director reported to me that hospitalization of cholera pa-
tients was warranted because hospitals were sites of safety. He said he
preferred to hold rehydrated patients overnight rather than discharging
them at night to empty, dark, and dangerous streets. Patients sought
hospitalization because absence from work could only be justied with
a hospital discharge certicate or similar proof of severity of illness. As
Cueto pointed out, for Peru, The epidemic helped the population mod-
ify some of its expectations about health services. Free services hadnt
existed for many years in the majority of hospitals, but this right returned
with cholera and the population demanded to be attended in these es-
tablishments without any charge (Cueto 1997:201). Thus budget pro-
cesses, regulations about worker absence, and beliefs about treatment
efcacy combined to create incentives for expensive hospitalization and
intravenous treatment over cheaper outpatient therapy and oral treat-
ment.
D. Recovery or Recrimination?
At the end of Garca M arquezs book Love in the Time of Cholera, Flo-
rentino Ariza and Fermina Daza, elderly lovers, ask how they might con-
tinue their romantic boat trip without cargo, without passengers, without
stops at any port. The captain responds:
The only thing that would allow them to bypass all that was a case of cholera on
board. The ship would be quarantined, it would hoist the yellow ag and sail in
a state of emergency. Captain Samaritano had needed to do just that on several
occasions. . . . Besides, many times in the history of the river the yellow plague
ag had been own in order to evade taxes, or to avoid picking up an undesirable
passenger, or to elude inopportune inspections. . . . After all, everyone knew that
the time of cholera had not ended despite all the joyful statistics from the health
ofcials. (1988:342343)
Garca M arquez captures the metaphoric power of disease, a phe-
nomenon well-described by Susan Sontag in her books on cancer (1978)
and AIDS (1988). Anthropologists are interested in the manipulation
of disease metaphors both by governments and by individuals. I have
P1: JtR
Conclusion 119
described how government responses to cholera in Venezuela divided the
populace into poor sick and rich healthy citizens. Another example of this
type of analysis explored how government prevention messages divided
Brazil metaphorically into cholera-infested and cholera-free zones, which
mapped onto existing areas of poverty and wealth (Nations and Monte
1996). The residents of poor favelas resisted the government cholera con-
trol campaign, seeing it as a covert attempt to contain cholera in slums
and prevent its spread to wealthier neighborhoods (Ibid.:1010). Na-
tions and Monte described this seemingly inappropriate response of a
mother who had tested positive for cholera: Here we dont have cholera,
no! . . . Somebody invented it! They are inventing it! And they are going to
invent much more to come! . . . What do you think I am, some low-down
stray mutt dog? Residents responded to the prevention campaigns used
by the local health department, which spoke of a War Against Cholera,
with strategies of denial, anger, humor, andridicule of illness (Ibid.:1015).
They interpreted government battles against the disease as a war against
them. They were stigmatized by the disease, treated as sources of moral
pollution in addition to infection. For these reasons they resented the
government and rejected the campaigns. There are obvious parallels in
this example to the reactions of marginal urban populations to the AIDS
or drug-resistant tuberculosis epidemics.
IV. Conclusion: Is Cholera a Signpost?
More than 150 years ago, in 1848, an epidemic of typhus was raging in
Upper Silesia, part of what is now Poland. In Chapter 2, I mentioned
Rudolf Virchow, the cellular pathologist and political progressive, who
wrote at that time that [e]pidemics are like sign-posts from which the
statesman can read that [there is a national] disturbance . . . that not even
careless politics can overlook (Virchow 1848 [1985]). Medical anthro-
pology focuses our attention on the interplay between disease as an out-
come of ideas and practices, and disease as a cause of ideas and practices.
As the sociologist Stephen Kunitz has put it, Diseases do not simply hap-
pen to society; they are as well an expression of that society (1994:142).
Cholera is only one of many recent epidemics that have created and ex-
pressed social and cultural trauma. AIDS is an easily recognized example
of this in the United States and many other countries; it was rst iden-
tied by U.S. epidemiologists as a gay disease, and later as a Haitian
one (Farmer 1993). The slow virus kuru in New Guinea brought accusa-
tions of sorcery and new mass attempts to expel evil spirits from villages
(Lindenbaum 1979). Plague in India caused signicant but unnecessary
trade cutoffs by Islamic countries in the 1990s, at a cost of many hundreds
P1: JtR
of millions of dollars. The epidemic of SARS cost China, Hong Kong,
and Taiwan billions of dollars in lost revenue in only the rst two months.
In each of these instances epidemics revealed particular rifts in society:
poor versus rich, gay versus straight, sorcerers versus aficted, Hindu
versus Muslim, West versus East.
Anthropologists use a number of concepts that link culture to the un-
derstanding of epidemics, and these concepts are relevant to other disci-
plines as well. Aholistic stance allows data on history, politics, and culture
to be combined to understand why particular environments become re-
ceptive to disease insults at particular moments. Examining andcritiquing
individual and group risk allows categories of blame and types of inter-
vention processes to be made more explicit and visible. Looking at how
health systems change in response to new insults suggests new ways to
evaluate health systemperformance. Revealing howgovernments use dis-
ease labels to create and perpetuate class and ethnic divisions is useful
not only in evaluating and designing better health interventions but also
in understanding howgovernments create and reinforce stratication. Fi-
nally, describing how a populace reacts to new interventions sheds light
not only on the public health merits of the intervention but also on the so-
cial and cultural composition of that populace (Lindenboun 1979, Syme
1974). In some instances these insights can be used to improve interven-
tions, in other instances these insights can provide an important external
critique.
So the question remains: what does the cholera outbreak say about
culture? Its reappearance in the Americas is a sign of systems in acute
distress. Cholera mirrors the divisions of wealth and power within coun-
tries and between North America and South or Central America. It even
reveals the immorality of emergency assistance: the U.S. Congress allo-
cated $10 million in 1992 for cholera activities in Latin America, but it did
not assign any special funds to a simultaneous cholera epidemic in Africa.
According to WHO, the African epidemic killed almost 14,000 people
among 155,000 cases reported in 1992, for a CFR of 9% (WHO 2000).
Anthropological accounts of cholera probe and reveal deeply held ideas
about risk and danger: the risk that the poor pose to the rich; that the
sick pose to the healthy; that those who are suffering pose to those who
are celebrating.
Although cholera transmission and treatment reveal particular com-
ponents of human behavior and thought, other modern epidemics have
their own stories to tell: AIDS, lung cancer, Mad Cow Disease, SARS,
or any of dozens of other diseases also reveal how human groups are or-
ganized, ranked, managed, and sustained or exterminated over time. To
explore this issue fully, and to learn what is unique and what general,
P1: JtR
would require more anthropological outbreak investigations (e.g., Briggs
and Mantini-Briggs 2003, Farmer 1999, Guillemin 1999, Lindenbaum
1979).
Cholera is, of course, a disease particularly rich in metaphor, which is
why Garca M arquez chose it for his novel. It is full of death and menace
and spreads along social boundaries, but it also creates opportunities
for people to offer a social critique, reposition their social identity, or
manipulate their environment. These are some of the pathways through
which disease becomes an expression of society. The main characters
in Love in the Time of Cholera manipulate the disease to achieve a nal
transcendence. In the very last line of the novel, while the ship carries
the elderly lovers offshore falsely ying the cholera ag, the captain asks,
And how long do you think we can keep up this coming and going?
Florentino Ariza had kept his answer ready for fty-three years, seven
months, and eleven days and nights [since he had rst laid eyes on his
beloved]. Forever, he said. (Garca M arquez 1989:348)
FOR FURTHER READING
Barua D. and W. B. Greenough III, eds. 1992. Cholera. New York: Plenum
Medical Book Company.
Briggs C. L. and C. Mantini-Briggs. 2003. Stories in Times of Cholera: The Transna-
tional Circulation of Bacteria and Racial Stigmata in a Venezuelan Epidemic.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rosenberg C. E. 1987. The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and
1866. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
SnowJ. 1936 [1855]. Snowon Cholera; Being a Reprint of Two Papers by John Snow.
2nd. rev. edition. New York: Commonwealth Fund.
P1: KcT/... P2: JtR
6 Anthropological and Epidemiological
Collaboration to Help Communities
Become Healthier
The principle that health programs should start with people as they are
and the community as it is applies both at home and abroad. . . . The
problem is how to implement the principle. The real challenge is to
discover just where particular groups of people stand; a willingness to
meet them must be matched by a knowledge of the meeting place.
(Paul 1955:4767)
I. Introduction
When I awake in foreign hotels late at night with jet lag, I sometimes
turn on the television. This often is the best time to watch for ofcial
government messages about how to avoid malnutrition, AIDS, malaria,
diarrhea, or a host of other modern plagues. Campaigns like these to
increase health and reduce disease are an increasingly important part of
public health work, although their appearance at 3 .. belies their im-
portance relative to other shows and advertisements on television. Where
do these messages come from, and why do they often appear when they
are least likely to be seen?
Organized attempts to inuence human thought, motivation, and be-
havior, and the environment in which that behavior takes place, are called
interventions in todays public health vocabulary, and intervention re-
search is its own domain. World AIDS Day (December 1) is designed
to increase awareness of health concerns. Television campaigns to pro-
mote exercise, condomuse, low-cholesterol diets, or mass immunizations
are undertaken to increase behavior thought to prevent disease. Cam-
paigns to reduce smoking or alcohol consumption aimto reduce behavior
thought to promote disease. And work to design safer highways, automo-
biles, or consumer products is done to create healthy environments.
This chapter argues that anthropological methods and theories should
play a more prominent role in community public health interventions for
122
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Introduction 123
a host of reasons. Familiarity with community eases entr ee and promotes
better research and practice, whether it is to measure disease burden or
begin a program to dispose of hazardous waste more justly and equitably.
Ethnographic data about social interaction, relative social ranking, topic
sensitivity, and similar themes are relevant to intervention designs just as
they are to other types of public health research. This reects the emphasis
on knowing where people stand expressed in the chapter-opening quote
fromanthropologist Benjamin Paul. But as we have seen in prior chapters,
anthropological analysis also reveals the social and cultural standpoint of
intervention designers.
Public health interventions reect prevailing evidence and prejudices
about what problems can be inuenced and what causes them in the
rst place. Chapter 2 showed that epidemiologists over time have pro-
duced many denitions of what constitutes a healthy or a risky life. The
history of public health interventions provides a varied list of problems
and proposed remedies, from removal of lth and noxious efuvia to
immunization, elimination of poverty, and reduction of inequality. As
epidemiologists increasingly have become focused on measuring health
risks, they also increasingly have become involved in designing programs
to reduce those risks but in the process they have learned that knowledge
of risks alone is rarely sufcient to design interventions that will achieve
desired results.
When epidemiologists become involved in health interventions to
change health practices for an entire community, they confront new and
often unfamiliar challenges. Many a smoker or dieter could testify that
there are dramatic differences between knowing what to do and being able
to do it. And many an epidemiologist could testify that identifying behav-
iors that increase disease risk does not lead easily to effective programs to
change those behaviors. Even the most captivating television campaign to
convince people to exercise cannot have much impact at 3 .. Because
anthropologists and other social scientists focus on links between indi-
vidual and group behavior, and between knowledge and practice, they
also can participate effectively in community health interventions.
Many of the examples described here are drawn from public health
rather than anthropology. Public health has a long history of intervention
design, whereas anthropology has an equally long history of intentional
nonintervention. This is primarily because the discipline of anthropology
takes differences across cultures as phenomena to be explained rather
than changed. Anthropologists are trained to look for local rationales;
they observe what they nd rather than converting it into something
more familiar. The anthropological subeld called applied anthropol-
ogy has the longest, most detailed history of engagement in trying to
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124 Collaboration to Help Communities Become Healthier
create or manage social and cultural change. But much of the research of
applied anthropologists historically was designed and sponsored by other
disciplines or programs. Until relatively recently, health-related research
in anthropology more often analyzed program failures than engaged in
program design. For example, the anthropologist Philippe Bourgois has
asked why there are so few prevention research projects in the areas of
substance abuse and HIV/AIDSthat combine quantitative and qualitative
approaches (1999, 2002). This chapter therefore is intended not only to
show intervention designers the value of anthropological knowledge and
collaboration but also to help anthropologists better understand where
and how they can participate in designing health interventions.
Researchers in public health have paid renewed attention to inter-
vention design for communities and entire populations in the past few
decades. This is partly a response to the new health challenges posed by
chronic diseases like cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes, mainly
in more developed nations of the world. But they also have made this
change because epidemiologic and experimental data from interventions
show that it is more effective to intervene on an entire group than on
high-risk individuals.
As part of this process of discovery, intervention designers have identi-
ed at least four levels of interventions, including education of individuals
and groups, management changes in organized groups, legislative and
policy decisions affecting society at large, and environmental changes
manipulating physical space. The last three have together been labeled as
structural interventions, dened as interventions that work by alter-
ing the context within which health is produced or reproduced. . . in the
social, economic, and political environments that shape and constrain in-
dividual, community, and societal health outcomes (Blankenship et al.
2000:S11). These intervention levels can be illustrated in thinking about
how to reduce trafc fatalities. Physicians are educating drivers about the
perils of drinking and driving; managers are changing work rules to pro-
mote carpooling or to vary commute hours; legislators are mandating the
use of seatbelts, changing speed limits, and raising the drinking age; and
engineers are designing cars and roads to reduce the overall likelihood of
accidents and reduce the likelihood that any accidents will yield fatalities.
Yet these changes have been offset partially by citizens of the United
States buying large numbers of huge automobiles (sport utility vehicles,
or SUVs) known to be more likely to cause trafc fatalities than smaller,
lighter cars. Asking what social, economic, and political environments
shape this behavior would require us to cast a broader net. Which
American values help citizens choose to purchase large SUVs? Are they
simply trying to protect themselves fromother drivers in large SUVs? Why
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Introduction 125
do U.S. tax codes promote faster write-offs for large vehicles, and why do
vehicle emissions policies promote trucks? Do gasoline pricing and the
politics of oil exploration promote high fuel consumption? If so, should
SUVsales simply be explained as satisfying the desires of the consumer?
Thinking about structural interventions helps us to create more compre-
hensive explanations of the causes of illness and premature death.
Educational, managerial, and legislative interventions are most effec-
tive when they are mutually reinforcing, creating new cultural expecta-
tions. For example, the struggle to reduce cigarette smoking in the United
States was ineffective when it relied primarily on educational messages
about the health effects of tobacco use. It became more effective when the
availability of cigarettes to minors was limited by reducing the number
and changing the locations of cigarette vending machines and by making
sales to minors illegal, when smoke-free zones were created, and when
cigarette excise taxes were raised, making smoking more expensive. But
it became truly powerful for some groups when these interventions were
reinforced by cultural changes labeling smoking dirty, uncool, and obnox-
ious rather than sophisticated and enticing. Thus it is important to discuss
the cultural context of each of these intervention levels and to show how
anthropologists have contributed to their design and implementation.
A. Educational Interventions
Educational interventions in public health are generally based on theo-
ries about the importance of information to health behavior. Knowledge
is obviously important in changing health-related practices because it
works on so many levels at once. People can act purposively only when
they know what to do; they are more motivated to act if they know they
are personally menaced; in general they prefer truth to falsehood. All of
these dimensions can be inuenced by education, and by the knowledge
that education seeks to produce. Education for literacy, especially literacy
for girls, is well-documented to inuence many indicators of health and
well-being (World Bank 1999). But anthropologists and other social sci-
entists have raised many doubts regarding the assumption that education
about specic health issues is a critical intervention by itself (Hahn 1999,
Kendall 1989, Paredes et al. 1996).
Knowledge about health and disease, while important, is not always
necessary and sufcient to bring about change. A college student may
know what smoke does to her lungs, but her addiction and peer group
pressure and habit will act as strong disincentives for her to act as her
knowledge would direct. In fact, smoking among college students is in-
creasing in the United States (Wechsler et al. 1998). College students,
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like many other people, do not always think about the actions they un-
dertake, and, even when they do, their knowledge of what to do may not
allow them to overcome barriers like nicotine addiction or incentives like
peer pressure.
Another assumption behind most education interventions is that
knowledge ows from the top to the bottom of social hierarchies, and
from experts to lay people. According to this position, if people act in
ways that professionals deem unhealthy, they must do so from ignorance.
Knowledge provided by professionals will bring about proper behavior.
But all groups have specic knowledge, and they use this knowledge to
guide and justify their behaviors. A metaphor called the fallacy of the
empty vessel was used to highlight this problem in a 1963 review of
medical anthropology (Polgar 1963). Stephen Polgar, a colleague of John
Cassels at the University of North Carolina (see Chapter 2), wrote that
people are not empty vessels waiting to be lled with the latest and most
advanced knowledge. They work out their own accommodations to lo-
cal health constraints over time, and their accommodations to local cir-
cumstance form coherent systems of belief and behavior. Information in
health campaigns often fails to convince an audience that already holds
competing understandings and beliefs.
The concept of local knowledge has long been of interest to anthro-
pologists. This phrase emphasizes that knowledge has many different def-
initions, and that local systems of knowledge often compete with more
widespread, dominant, national and international systems of knowledge.
For example, local classications and treatments of disease can conict
with biomedical explanations and pharmaceutical remedies for the same
ailments. Knowledge about health moves in many directions, and edu-
cational campaigns about health must take pre-existing and competing
knowledge into account.
Campaigns to educate poor urban Peruvians about the need to boil wa-
ter are an example of what can happen when educational interventions fail
to take local knowledge and context into account. Two research studies
at very different points in time looked at why public health interventions
failed to change rates of water boiling in Peru. The rst, by anthropologist
Edward Wellin in 1953, concluded that decisions to boil or not to boil
water were made for many diverse reasons, with education playing only a
minor role (Wellin 1955:100ff). Reasons for boiling ranged from feeling
sickly to rejecting local values about cleanliness to wanting to satisfy the
outreach worker. Reasons for not boiling ranged from not having time to
not accepting newhealth values. Wellin emphasized that it is not enough
that action workers know the items of custom that characterize the com-
munitys way of life; they must also understand how these customs are
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Introduction 127
linked with one another (1955:100101). An interdisciplinary study in
Peru some four decades later found similar linked processes still impeding
water boiling: this time researchers concluded that residents did not have
enough water to begin with, but they also lacked the resources to pay for
the extra fuel and often did not even possess the extra pot needed to store
the boiled water safely during the day (Gilman et al. 1993). The fact that
two studies separated by four decades point to similar impediments to
water boiling further shows that researchers knowledge is not sufcient
to create effective interventions.
Many public health interventions today are designed to increase some
particular behavior like water boiling, smoking, or condomuse in a speci-
ed population like rural mothers, adolescent girls, or clients of sex work-
ers. Epidemiologists involved in these types of interventions sometimes
appear to assume that the design of effective interventions depends most
heavily on accurately identifying risk factors. But communication theorist
Robert Hornik, who was involved in community studies to reduce heart
disease, has argued that data on risk factors themselves are insufcient to
design effective intervention campaigns. Instead, Hornik contends, one
needs to know the risks for the risk factors in order to design interven-
tions that will inuence those underlying causes (Hornik 1990: personal
communication). For example, knowledge that saturated fats are a strong
dietary risk factor for heart disease must be combined with knowledge
about why people consume saturated fats.
This also has been called the difference between proximate and ulti-
mate causes. An epidemiologic study of the causes of diarrheal disease
may show that drinking contaminated water is a major risk factor or the
proximate cause of disease. But an intervention to increase water boiling
can only succeed when people have the needed resources such as water,
pots, time, and fuel. Lack of resources, rather than failure to boil water, is
the ultimate cause of this disease. This is an epidemiological restatement
of Wellins point: knowing items of custom is not the same as knowing
howcustoms are linked, nor is it the same as knowing whether newbehav-
iors are feasible in an old context. Knowing which behaviors pose greatest
risk is not the same as knowing whether behaviors are interdependent, or
whether they can be modied. In fact, it could be argued that if knowl-
edge is an attribute of populations, the knowing risks for risks rationale
should cause intervention designers to study the underlying sources of
local knowledge and ignorance at the population level.
Educational interventions tend to ignore history, politics, and environ-
ment. Much as peer group pressure or addiction can diminish knowledge-
based motivation to change behavior, so also can government neglect,
poverty, and powerlessness inhibit health-related change, as we have seen
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in the water-boiling example. Political and social ideologies are a relevant
part of that environment. Dramatic new state-level initiatives are difcult
to design and implement in sites where health responsibilities have long
been thought to reside in individuals. Take the case of medication use.
Almost all countries in the world place extensive limits on what is called
direct to consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals, and almost all have
rejected attempts to weaken these limits. They reason that drug compa-
nies will use advertising to place extra pressure on consumers to request
new and expensive drugs without knowledge of their efcacy. But in the
United States many forces are arrayed against promoting more rational
use of medications by consumers and prescribers. Rhetoric about free
choice, freedom to advertise, consumer power, and physician control are
all marshaled in support of limited governmental regulation and control
of prescribing. Education about proper prescribing takes place within a
context that limits the effectiveness of that education.
Or return to anti-smoking campaigns. Public health campaigns in the
United States focused for decades on getting the message out that
smoking caused lung cancer, heart disease, stroke, miscarriages, and fetal
defects. But practically any U.S. citizen can remember (and still see) the
tiny print size and poor location of these mandated educational messages
on cigarette packets and advertisements in newspapers and on billboards.
Knowledge that smoking kills when used as directed is not sufcient to
prevent adolescents from starting to smoke (Romer and Jamieson 2001).
The increase in smoking among U.S. college students shows this all too
well. Creative advertisers put favorable images of smoking on race cars,
golf games, cartoon characters, free samples, clothing, billboards, and
sports arenas, and in movies, videos, and magazines, and these images
create a climate that encourages smoking despite the known health risks.
Tobacco companies have complained bitterly about, and taken legal ac-
tion against, aggressive anti-smoking media campaigns targeted at U.S.
adolescents (see www.americanlegacy.org). Anti-smoking ads are effec-
tive not because they offer new education about risk but rather because
they counter favorable images of mountains and cowboys with equal
(or more powerful) unfavorable images of body bags and overowing
ashtrays.
Information and education themselves are rarely sufcient to prompt
change. This point opens another area where anthropological knowledge
and training are relevant to intervention design. Some of the risk factors
for risk factors or ultimate determinants of behavior are functions
of motivation and perceived risk domains of meaning and perception
where anthropologists often practice their craft. Anthropological studies
of behavior and of the perceived risks and benets of changing behavior
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Introduction 129
can reveal the complex motivations for action and the types of incentives
that will inhibit or facilitate behavior change.
A focus on educational interventions has a built-in bias toward seeing
health problems as functions of individual irresponsibility on one hand,
or cultural backwardness or maladaptation on the other. After all, if it is
easy to blame people for being ignorant; it is easier to blame them, or
their culture, when they continue to damage their health by doing things
they (or others) know they should not. This type of focus on culture
has a number of pitfalls. Paul Farmer, an anthropologist and clinician
at Harvard, argues that structural violence is obscured by labeling health
inequalities as products of cultural difference, and that this minimizes the
roles of poverty and inequality and exaggerates the extent of patient con-
trol (1999:4750). Directing interventions toward individuals rather than
toward organizations or politics is itself a political statement of support
for the status quo.
B. Managerial and Administrative Interventions
A second type of intervention involves the managerial or administrative
level of organizations. Such interventions often take place in hospitals
and clinics, although they also could take place at any worksite or other
organized activity with identiable leadership. They consist of changes in
work practices or management policies or other rules designed to guide
behavior at a particular site. Some examples from health services in-
clude modications to rules about record-keeping, second opinions, or
case audits, as well as decisions to implement in-service training or other
continuing-education activities for an entire staff. Managerial and ad-
ministrative interventions also have been used by owners of brothels to
increase condom use (Hanenberg and Rojanapithayakom 1996), schools
to improve student nutrition or teacher performance in health classes
(Downey et al. 1988), cities to reduce stress and absenteeism among bus
drivers (Kompier et al. 2000), and businesses to reduce violence among
employees (Loomis et al. 2002).
Studies of service-based risk factors often contribute to managerial and
administrative interventions. For example, epidemiologic studies showed
that hospital provision of infant formula to new mothers was one signi-
cant impediment to early and successful initiation of breastfeeding. Hos-
pitals were asked to change whether formula was available, to whom, and
in what quantities. (These changes also were pushed by a well-organized
boycott of infant formula producers, which will be described shortly.)
Baby-friendly interventions, developed by UNICEFand WHO, broad-
ened managerial interventions in hospitals to promote breastfeeding: they
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disseminated written policies that promote breastfeeding, trained staff in
their implementation, allowed mothers to room in with their babies,
and encouraged breastfeeding on demand. Managerial interventions can
prot fromextensive ethnographic knowledge about staff motivations and
incentive systems. Efforts to reduce inappropriate distribution of baby
formula by nurses in China beneted by having anthropologists, who
used observations and open-ended interviewing, identify what sources of
information new mothers deemed authoritative and what roles industrial
representatives or free samples played (see, e.g., Gottschang 2000).
Managerial interventions, by denition, are used in workplaces. They
are especially important in the realm of occupational and environmen-
tal health, where researchers seek ways to organize worksites to expose
workers to fewer hazards. Yet anthropologists rarely study the relation-
ships between worker organization and worksite health (see Janes and
Ames 1992 for an exception). They are not the only ones neglecting this
area: new ways to organize production (e.g., total quality management,
modular manufacturing) have not yet been well evaluated for their impact
on occupational injuries or job stress (Landsbergis et al. 1999).
These types of interventions may be completely ineffective if they are
not preceded by extensive studies of howadministrative policies and man-
agement practices inuence existing behavior. The anthropologist Judith
Justice provided an important example of a managerial intervention in
Nepal when she described the failure of a programto send assistant nurse-
midwives to rural areas in Nepal (Justice 1999). The program, enacted
largely as a result of international pressure, paid insufcient attention to
the political context and culture. Local concerns, like role expectations
for single women in rural health posts and the questionable authority
of young unmarried and childless women trying to work as midwives,
ultimately defeated it. The ill-fated effort also failed to consider the pro-
fessional concerns of assistant nurse-midwives, who expected to improve
their job status and security by living in urban areas.
Interventions to change managerial or administrative practices should
not be undertaken or understood as actions separate from their institu-
tional and public context. When institutions change management prac-
tices they also make public statements about their values and goals,
and their internal policies usually reect outside pressures and broad
concerns. These policies help to create ongoing roles by individuals in-
side organizations, and the resulting organizational culture is maintained
through training, incentive systems, habit, and preference. To be truly
effective, managerial interventions must be part of a changing organiza-
tional culture.
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Introduction 131
C. Legislative Interventions
Legislative interventions often cover large audiences and usually carry
explicit premiums (e.g., tax incentives) or penalties (e.g., nes or jail
terms). To revisit the example of breastfeeding, legislative interventions
designed to increase breastfeeding could repeal laws that prohibit women
from breastfeeding in public, pass legislation that limits sales of infant
formula, increase taxes on formula, outlaw distribution of free formula
in hospitals, or broaden parental leave policies so that women would
face fewer work-based obstacles to establishing breastfeeding routines.
Legislative interventions require support from policy makers and take
time to pass and implement.
Although legislative interventions have broad application, they often
target sites in addition to practices. So, for example, laws that prohibit
hospitals and doctors from offering infant formula to mothers of new-
borns are forms of health intervention that are more focused than edu-
cating all mothers that they should breastfeed as soon as they can after
giving birth or that they should reject infant formula at this time.
Social scientists interested in legislative interventions point out that
they almost invariably involve struggles between competing interest
groups, with signicant resources at stake. For example, the legislative
changes that altered the sales tactics of the Nestl e company in its world-
wide distribution of infant formula in hospitals came about largely be-
cause of consumer pressure. ANestl e product boycott spread throughout
the world between 1977 and 1984; ghting it cost the company between
$40 and $100 million (Financial Times, January 27, 1984:4; Washington
Post, January 27, 1984:A1). In the end the company changed its infant
formula marketing practices.
But legislation is far froma perfect formof intervention. Cigarettes and
illicit drugs are widely available to minors in the United States despite
being illegal. And although payments by cigarette companies following
the tobacco settlement in the United States were supposed to be used
by states to fund smoking interventions, they have instead been reappro-
priated by state governments to support general expenses ranging from
health care to road building to education.
D. Environmental Interventions
Environmental interventions change physical space, or the use of physical
space, so as to link a desired outcome inextricably with some practice.
For example, if the objective is to reduce trafc fatalities, environmental
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interventions can modify how cars behave in accidents (how they brake,
whether they have air bags, what force it takes to collapse a steering
column). They also can inuence how likely it is that roads themselves
expose people to mortal hazards from bridge abutments, confusing lane
mergers, or oncoming trafc. Because environmental interventions take
choice out of the picture, when well-designed they can be extraordinarily
effective. Iodizing salt and adding Vitamin D to milk are good examples
of such environmental interventions. On a larger scale, chlorinating and
uoridating water at a central source is more effective than trying to
educate people to add it at their homes, assuming the integrity of the
delivery system.
The involuntary and public character of environmental interventions
makes them especially contentious, even as it makes them particularly ef-
fective. In sites where health is thought to be an individual attribute, sub-
ject to individual rights, state manipulation of public behavior is viewed
with deep suspicion. Thus the history of public health interventions in
the United States is lled with examples of citizens asserting that govern-
ment regulations about smoking, uoride, vaccinations, or use of seat-
belts impede their freedom and right to choose. This discomfort with
state-sponsored limits to behavior may be one reason why such inter-
ventions are not more popular in epidemiologic thinking in the United
States. On the other hand, relative comfort with a strong state role in
public health make disease surveillance and environmental interventions
more acceptable in countries like Denmark, Germany, and Japan. De-
bates about whether government has a legitimate right to limit individual
freedomare a cultural component of decision-making about environmen-
tal interventions.
But other factors also restrict the use of environmental interventions.
As noted earlier, the category place is still poorly conceptualized and mea-
sured in epidemiology. This hinders public health thinking about place-
based interventions, where designers might think about how physical
context gives behavioral cues and channels human social relationships in
certain directions. Here one might envision which neighborhood layouts
are likeliest to lead to social network formation among residents or how
to design nursing homes that will maximize the comfort of Alzheimers
patients.
Political forces also impede development of some types of environmen-
tal interventions. Despite the emerging evidence about the broad and
strong inuence of poverty and inequality on health, for example, inter-
ventions that would change resource distribution, wealth accumulation,
or zoning practices are branded as social engineering or class warfare
rather than as sound public health policy. These types of interventions
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Introduction 133
constrain the wealthy and powerful in ways that educational interventions
do not, and they are therefore more threatening.
E. Other Intervention Categories
From an anthropological perspective, the restricted use of environmental
interventions is just one manifestation of a larger problem: that of cat-
egorization. Employing a framework in which interventions are said to
work at four levels leads to its own limited set of recommendations.
And thinking of interventions only in terms of these four levels limits our
ability to pay attention to power (for example) as a central organizing prin-
ciple of health intervention design. That is, structural interventions often
work because they challenge and reframe both conventional behavior and
conventional wisdomabout where change takes place. Interventions work
to the extent that they create new resources as well as new expectations,
but new resources can be more difcult to nd when ones attention is
focused on just one type of managerial or knowledge-based solution.
The efcacy of interventions is greater when they take place at mul-
tiple levels to reinforce behavior change. The case of creative condom
promotion is a brilliant example of mixing intervention types to promote
cultural change. In Thailand, Mechai Viravaidya was the source of many
creative and effective interventions to deal with birth control and AIDS
prevention. When HIV/AIDS rst came to Thailand, Mechai was already
an important gure in family planning, and he used that knowledge and
status to design AIDS interventions. Mechai used humor to approach
sensitive areas of health behavior such as sex. For example, for many
years his organization ran a restaurant called Cabbages and Condoms
that had a bowl of free condoms at the cash register, where one might cus-
tomarily expect to nd a plate of mints. To reduce the mystique and illicit
overtones of condoms, he sponsored condom-inating contests in rural
villages, in which prestigious elderly men competed. To help prospec-
tive clients of sex workers get exposed to AIDS prevention messages,
his organization distributed condom education tapes to taxi drivers and
asked them to play them on their car stereos whenever clients requested
rides to houses of prostitution. A program called Cops and Rubbers
gave condoms to policemen to distribute on New Years Eve. Mechai and
his colleagues were so successful in promoting condom use in Thailand
that condoms are now called mechais. The rate of AIDS increase has
slowed in Thailand but not in neighboring countries, where AIDS control
policies are more conservative and less creative.
Deciding which to choose among the four categories of educational,
managerial, legislative, and environmental interventions implies making
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judgments about what can be changed and what cannot, who has power
and who does not. The behavioral theories behind most interventions
assume that individuals are the controlling force and agent of change.
Create a disposition to change in an individual, the theory goes, and
you can then offer specic instructions to that individual for how that
change can be accomplished. But Ronald Frankenberg (1993) has sug-
gested that when risk is seen as individual, it becomes something that
people other than doctors (particularly patients) must do something
about. He has pointed out that other aspects of risk get distributed across
the professions involved in disease prevention and then become their
responsibilities: clinical aspects of risk are perceived to be the domain of
doctors and nurses, social aspects of risk are the domain of policy mak-
ers, and nonmodiable aspects of risk like age or history are the domain
of health educators who use them to mark their targets (Frankenberg
1993:230). This limits creative work on new intervention strategies and
overemphasizes the power of individuals to create long-lasting change by
themselves.
Medical anthropologists have undertaken educational, managerial,
legislative, and environmental interventions, but they also have asked
whether other categories of intervention might be equally compelling.
For example, Corbett (2001) uses a social ecological framework to de-
scribe tobacco interventions at individual, group, organization, commu-
nity, and population levels. And when Parker et al. (2000) describe
international research on HIV prevention, they group structural and
environmental factors together, paying particular attention to categories
of economic underdevelopment and poverty, mobility, seasonal work,
social disruption from war and political instability, gender inequality,
and the effects of governmental and intergovernmental policies. Struc-
tural interventions require paying just as much attention to local context
as do managerial or educational interventions, and one important con-
textual question in the international domain is whether an intervention
can be equally successful in areas with many resources versus those with
few to none.
The anthropologist Mary Douglas has asked why more attention has
not been paid to the role institutions play in focusing human concern
on low-probability events with dramatic consequences, rather than high-
probability events with more mundane consequences (Douglas 1992:55
60). For example, how are people led to pay so much attention to deaths
from airplane crashes and so little to the much more common problem
of deaths from auto accidents? Why are a few deaths from Ebola virus so
much more frightening than millions of deaths from malnutrition? This
theme will be explored more fully in the next chapter.
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The Community in Public Health Interventions 135
II. The Community in Public Health Interventions
A. The Difference between Intervening with Individuals
and Populations
One of the most important ideas in the development of community inter-
ventions is that sustained attention must be devoted to the determinants
of disease incidence in populations. This idea has best been championed
by the British epidemiologist Geoffrey Rose. In 1985 Rose explored the
difference between thinking about the causes and prevention of disease
in specic individuals as compared with the causes and prevention of dis-
ease in populations. Rose pointed out that much of epidemiology consists
of case-control and cohort studies that measure differences between sick
and healthy individuals. But these studies take it for granted that expo-
sure is heterogeneous in a population if all individuals smoked, then
lung cancer could not be attributed to smoking. Rose then challenged his
readers to consider how to handle instances where an entire population is
exposed to some disease determinant. He pointed out that only compar-
isons across populations, or changes within populations over time, can
reveal this type of inuence, not simply comparisons of sick to healthy
individuals within a population.
How is this relevant to intervention design? Rose identied two de-
sign approaches: the high-risk strategy and the population strategy.
The high-risk strategy is based on identifying individuals who, based on
screening for symptoms or behaviors, are likely to develop some disease
in the future. Specic strategies are then created for these individuals,
who are motivated to follow them because they know that otherwise they
are at particularly high risk to develop a disease. Smoking cessation pro-
grams for smokers who have trouble breathing and dietary interventions
for people who are obese and feel faint both follow this process of iden-
tifying individuals at risk and working with them to reduce their risks.
The population strategy works differently. As Rose put it, This is the
attempt to control the determinants of incidence, to lower the mean level
of risk factors, to shift the whole distribution of exposure in a favourable
direction (Rose 1985:37). Rather than identifying and intervening on
specic individuals at high risk of developing disease, the population ap-
proachtries to reduce risk for all by changing the environment or changing
general norms of behavior. This is effective because exposure is reduced
for a very large number of people. Reducing risk slightly for all can prevent
more cases than reducing risk signicantly among a few. And reducing
risk for all also makes future cases less probable, something the individual
approach does not address.
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The emphasis on population interventions has some subtle but pro-
found implications for standard anthropological approaches to interven-
tion design. With the exception of those who employ a political-economic
perspective, medical anthropologists have tended to work on interven-
tions among marginalized and minority individuals, those belonging to
groups identied as having specic increased risk of disease because of
their social position. But Rose urged a shift in this emphasis toward
smaller risk reduction strategies in the population at large. He admitted
that both strategies would be needed for the foreseeable future, but he saw
the biggest public health payoffs coming from the population approach.
One anthropological caveat to Rose is to point out that the notion of
population among humans is a problematic concept in its own right and
should not be taken for granted. We saw the arbitrariness of many place-
and person-based boundaries described in Chapter 4 and the inuence
of political boundaries on mean cholera case fatality rates in Chapter 5.
It is not at all straightforward to decide what the relevant boundaries
of human populations should be, especially if the goal is to compare a
variety of exposures among them. Population-based interventions that
take the boundaries of towns or provinces for granted may be challenged
by the diverse meanings and contexts of health behaviors within those
boundaries.
B. How Community Changes Inuence Individual Changes
When epidemiologists and other public health specialists design inter-
ventions for entire communities, they have opportunities to learn more
about how community processes both inhibit and promote individual
behavior change: More detailed analyses of community change pro-
cesses are needed because we understand very little about them, but
they appear to have important effects on individual behavior (Fortmann
et al. 1995:582). Such statements are a call for the contextual and
processual data that anthropology can produce, as shown in Benjamin
Pauls pioneering volume on medical anthropology, Health, Culture, and
Community: Case Studies of Public Reactions to Health Programs, published
in 1955. Many of the chapters in this book have documented the reac-
tions of groups around the world to health interventions ranging from
mental health education to cholera vaccines to cooperative health associ-
ations. Analyses of legislation, political movements, media themes, and
the ways in which popular concerns are manifested in protests, jokes,
and songs are just a few of the ways by which anthropologists and other
social scientists assess the relationships between mass culture and in-
dividual action. Detailed observational studies of human behavior over
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The Community in Public Health Interventions 137
time complement the broad understandings of such behavior given by
surveys or analyses of textual content. In fact some public health re-
searchers have written that interventions designed to produce broad so-
cial and political changes must include qualitative evaluation components
to assess their impact completely (McKinlay 1993, Smedley and Syme
2000:27). Multidisciplinary research allows an interventions effects to be
traced through the many different connections between community and
individual.
Because of their complexity and expense, only a fewbroad community-
based intervention studies exist, but they have provided many impor-
tant conclusions about the feasibility and complexity of undertaking
community-wide interventions. Successful cardiovascular disease pre-
vention programs in Finland in the 1970s and 1980s were based on a
community intervention project in the province of North Karelia, where
the community itself rst requested the intervention (Puska et al. 1998).
The intervention aimed to lower blood pressure, smoking, and choles-
terol levels and to improve diets in the population at large. It involved not
just the health system, but also industry, schools, and voluntary organi-
zations. It succeeded in lowering cardiovascular disease rates in the rst
decade of the study and cancer rates in the second, showing the gains
attainable through population-based interventions.
The success of the North Karelia Project prompted other community-
based interventions. The best-known in the United States are probably
the Three Communities Study (Farquhar et al. 1977) and the Stanford
Five-City Project (Fortmann and Varady 2000), both of which took place
in California in the 1970s and 1980s. Like Karelia, these projects were
explicitly designed to inuence a broad population rather than specic
audiences such as patients in hospitals, smokers, or people with heart
disease. But these projects paid more explicit attention to communica-
tion theories. To amplify the effects of messages, they tried to stimulate
interpersonal discussion within communities and thereby increase their
diffusion. Radio, television, print media, and other printed materials were
used to distribute information, but community groups and various coali-
tions also were mobilized in support of the project goals. Considerable
efforts were expended to match messages and media types to different
audiences.
Community interventions to change health risk factors have left re-
searchers with many questions about complex communities:
Perhaps the most important lesson we have learned about communities is that
there is much we do not know. Much public health intervention research has
focused on the individual as the target of the change and of the intervention. Yet
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a consideration of communities as the units of intervention demands an under-
standing of the many elements within a community that inuence individuals and
their health behaviors. An integration of the multiple components of a commu-
nity, its families, networks, institutions, and policies, allows researchers not only
to understand each component more completely but also to determine the role
of each component in inuencing individual health behavior. (Fortmann et al.
1995:583)
The Five-City Project group acknowledged the importance of working
with both formal and informal networks of power, understanding cul-
tural differences within communities, and understanding how and why
chronic diseases come to be concentrated among the poor. Interventions
at community scale require adjusting research objectives to local goals
and constraints: the Five-City researchers mentioned the need to work
within communities; the importance of researchers giving up some power
over content, type, and scope of interventions; and the signicance of mo-
bilizing residents to change their own rules and regulations (Fortmann
et al. 1995:583). The list of research topics they identied as essential
to further progress in community intervention design is basically a set of
social science research issues:
r
what knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, and communication patterns
exist among population subgroups;
r
howorganizations, in addition to individuals, respond to interventions;
r
how media organizations convey health information; and
r
how, and under what pressures, local health-related policy initiatives
develop.
In essence, when the entire community is the site of a health interven-
tion, researchers must learn not only what individuals can do, but also
what existing groups and organizations can do, and what they may not be
willing to allow. Researchers involved in community interventions need
to understand how information and behavioral expectations travel across
social networks, and how political forces and legal frameworks support
or impede change.
Given the specicity of the intervention and the potential breadth of the
response, anthropological involvement in community intervention can
serve not only the health-related objectives of the intervention but also
the knowledge-based objectives of social scientists studying community
development. For example, the work of two community health organi-
zations in Hartford, Connecticut (the Hispanic Health Council and the
Institute of Community Research), has been interdisciplinary but also
heavily anthropological. Researchers at these groups were critical par-
ticipants in creating a community-directed syringe exchange program to
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Anthropological Participation in Population Interventions 139
reduce HIV transmission (Singer 2001, 2003) and in assessing HIV risk
among older urban adults (Radda et al. 2003). They have asked how
structural factors (such as stratication, service availability, and quality)
inuence the spread of AIDS, and how social marginalization of various
types (racial hatred, class discrimination, sexism, even daily indignities)
manifests itself in a variety of forms of social misery (Singer 2001). Singer
suggests that research on substances like alcohol, tobacco, and drugs is
a fruitful opportunity for collaboration within traditional anthropologi-
cal subelds of cultural, physical, and linguistic anthropology, as well as
archaeology, and that it takes anthropology into the bright light of di-
rect encounter with issues of pressing public concern (2001:210211).
Surely intentional public health interventions also can serve to diagnose
societies, because, like disease outbreaks, they create different kinds of re-
actions fromthe competing factions and interest groups that live together
in communities.
III. Anthropological Participation in Population
Interventions
As epidemiologists and public health researchers get more involved in
community interventions, they face challenges extending beyond their
customary disciplinary boundaries. Epidemiologists have acknowledged
their need to expand their expertise: for example, the theme for the 1998
annual meeting of the American College of Epidemiology was Epidemi-
ology and Community Interventions in Diverse Populations. Yet anthro-
pologists, who ostensibly understand a great deal about communities and
diversity, have rarely had central roles in designing large-scale community
health interventions.
Community interventions provide at least two different opportunities
for anthropologists: roles as brokers (mediators between cultures) and as
designers. Anthropological knowledge of how groups form and manipu-
late ethnic and other identities allows them to become brokers between
intervention designers and local communities. They have played this role
for at least four decades, since the Johns Hopkins medical geography
projects described in Chapter 2 and some of the studies published in
Pauls (1955) book. But the culture broker role is increasingly problem-
atic for outsiders because of the concerns about control and representa-
tiveness faced by any person claiming to be able to mediate between two
different social groups. The culture broker role also takes as given that
culture is the heart of the problem, when it may instead be place-based
risks such as environmental contamination or policy environments (e.g.,
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bank lending policies or welfare policies on daycare coverage) that place
some groups at systematic disadvantage.
The designer role is likelier to offer greater impact for anthropologists
in intervention projects. U.S. anthropologists have, in fact, developed
many culturally appropriate intervention models at the scale of an ur-
ban neighborhood or rural village (Nastasi and Berg 1999). But with
few exceptions, anthropologists have not participated as actively or of-
ten in the design and evaluation of interventions at larger scale. Many
of those who have participated in population-level responses to public
health challenges have been particularly interested in the political and
economic determinants of health (e.g., Hall et al. 1999 on smoking poli-
cies among Northwest Indian tribes, Nichter et al. 1997 and Ernster
et al. 2000 on women and smoking, Singer 2001 on needle exchange
programs, and Stebbins 1997 on smoking control legislation in West
Virginia). This is because population-level interventions require theo-
retical orientations that take account of large-scale structural change.
Medical anthropologists with a political-economic orientation are bet-
ter prepared to see opportunities and develop strategies to create such
change.
Many anthropologists have strong views about the perils of planned
change by supra-local institutions of government, religion, and com-
merce. Their experiences tend to make them suspicious of initiatives
planned from above without extensive participation by local communi-
ties. But to date most health interventions do arrive from above: they are
produced by experts with extensive data about the risks particular prac-
tices pose to health. They are imposed by bureaucrats and scientists who
assume that health is everyones rst priority, and that all people dene
health in basically the same way.
Much as epidemiologists have learned that community interventions
must adapt to local conditions, so anthropologists have argued that
planned change in communities must begin with extensive community
consultations, emerge from local denitions of need, and be continu-
ously subject to local review and adjustment over time (e.g., Nastasi and
Berg 1999). These requirements conict with those community health
interventions that specify in advance the desired health-related goals, the
behaviors needing change, and the messages required to prompt such
changes. As more health-related interventions take place at larger scale,
there will be more opportunities for anthropologists to become involved
in the types of consultative processes they champion. The next sections
describe studies by anthropologists in Brazil and Bangladesh that adapted
professional health-related objectives to existing contexts and practices in
the general population.
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Anthropological Participation in Population Interventions 141
A. Designing a Provider Intervention in Brazil
The Northeast is one of the poorest areas in Brazil; diarrheal disease there
is the most important cause of death among children under ve years of
age. Oral rehydration solution (ORS) is the most effective treatment for
dehydration caused by diarrhea; it can be prepared by mixing water with
glucose, sodium chloride, sodium bicarbonate, and potassium chloride.
Foil-wrapped packets are the formof ORS preferred by the World Health
Organization and by almost all physicians: these are easily dispensed and
stored, and they provide and regulate the ratio of most of the key ingredi-
ents in the solution. On the other hand packets are not always available,
and they keep control of therapy in professional hands rather than moth-
ers. A solution of salt, sugar, and water easily mixed in the home is less
expensive but quite close to the packet form of ORS, and mothers simply
can be urged to give extra liquids to sick children.
Anthropologists in Brazil believed that ORS should be introduced as
a simple household procedure rather than as a hospital-based, med-
ically controlled intervention (Nations et al. 1988). They considered
how to introduce oral rehydration therapy in a simpler and more cul-
turally sensitive fashion than the medicalized packets. The Northeast
has one doctor for every 2000 patients, but it has one traditional healer
for every 150 patients. So the anthropologists trained traditional heal-
ers to add salt and sugar in specied ratios to the medicinal teas they
already offered their patients with diarrhea. The herbs included in the
teas (often chamomile and peppermint) did not hinder the absorp-
tion of the liquid. With just slight modications to their customary
practices, the healers adapted familiar treatments to meet international
standards.
B. Designing a Household Intervention in Bangladesh
In the 1980s, eldworkers at the International Centre for Diarrheal Dis-
ease Research in Bangladesh were searching for ways to standardize the
proportions of sugar, salt, and water used by village women to prepare
sugar-salt solution. They learned that a large number of container sizes
existed within villages, and it was difcult to nd a standard-size con-
tainer in which to measure water. They adapted to local constraints by
asking mothers to bring their metal water vessels to a group meeting.
Then they lled a standard liter bottle of water and transferred its con-
tents, in turn, into each container brought by the women. Marking the
water line inside the container with a nail created a standard measure
within existing containers, a simple solution to a vexing problem.
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C. Interventions and Authority
There are many ways to reach individuals, and some of them take ad-
vantage of the power of social inuence. When risk becomes familial or
regional, then it becomes something for families and entire populations
to confront. An intervention to increase water hygiene, for example, can
begin with general messages to drink boiled water, and specic messages
about how long water must be boiled before it can be considered t for
drinking. These messages are targeted primarily at household caretakers,
almost invariably women. Other intervention campaigns are directed to
whole villages, neighborhoods, towns, or cities. This is what it means to
live here as a member of this community, such messages say, This is
how we live, and if you live here you should try to act this way, too. In-
terventions can take the form of political campaigns urging supporters to
demand their rights to clean water, adequate health services, or sufcient
food.
Health campaigns often rely on the authority of professionals to urge
the populace to change its use of medications. Other public health cam-
paigns urge the populace to stop smoking, drink responsibly, use con-
doms, wear seatbelts, brush teeth, or thoroughly cook meat. Intervention
designers rely on various sources of authority when they call for these
practices. They employ the authority of science that scientic studies
show that continuing practice X increases risk of outcome Y. They
employ the authority of government, urging citizens to comply because
policy X is more effective and less costly than policy Y. And they employ
the authority of medicine, that doctors say practice Z is healthier.
The next section looks at one source of authority for the health prac-
tices recommended by intervention designers: it describes sociocultural
inuences on the gold standard research design, the randomized con-
trolled trial.
IV. The Tools of Intervention Research: An Anthropological
Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials
A. How Patient and Physician Expectations Inuence the Conduct
of Randomized Controlled Trials
Epidemiology today is a primary source of the research designs relied on
to produce authoritative proof of the efcacy of some new intervention.
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are considered the most convincing
form of epidemiologic data about treatment efcacy. But RCTs are a
technology rather than a source of truth. This section argues that better
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The Tools of Intervention Research 143
understanding of the sociocultural components of RCTs will yield more
qualied acceptance of their power and better understanding of their
limits.
In their simplest form, RCTs (called clinical trials when specically
testing clinical interventions) start with a group of similar people with a
treatable health condition. These people are randomly allocated either to
receive a treatment (the experimental group) or no treatment (the control
group), and then they are followed over time while their response to treat-
ment is measured. Randomization is undertaken not to make both groups
equal but rather to evenly distribute both known and unknown factors
that might inuence response to treatment. Some RCTs also include a
group of people receiving a placebo, a substance similar to the treatment
substance in all ways except that it is designed to have no treatment ef-
cacy. RCTs use placebos to try to measure what part of a treatments
effects might be attributable solely to a patients expectations that the
treatment will be effective (see Moerman 2002).
RCTs are lled with sociocultural components. To begin with, they are
feasible only under certain social conditions. Undertaking a randomized
controlled trial is justied when there is a social and professional con-
sensus that an unanswered research question is important and that not
enough is known to warrant giving or withholding a treatment from all
patients. By the time that happens, the issue may have been well vetted
in the media, and people may have formed opinions about it. (This is
the case, e.g., with large-scale interventions to reduce smoking or heart
disease.) Individuals and entire communities may therefore debate and
change their practices even while a trial is getting underway. This aware-
ness effect can change the behavior of both experimental and control
groups at the same time, reducing the likelihood that an intervention will
produce notable improvement in experimental groups compared with
controls. There is an obvious paradox inherent in the fact that the same
conditions that make a controlled trial possible also can create difculties
in analyzing whether it has been successful.
Because clinical trials compare new treatments with existing treat-
ments, or with none at all, the experimental treatment must offer some
possibility of improvement over the existing accepted treatments or stan-
dards. Otherwise it would be ethically impossible to justify randomly
allocating the treatment to part of a population. When a therapy is es-
pecially promising and an illness particularly dangerous, trials must be
designed so that they can be stopped as soon as a new treatment appears
to be effective. That is, when scientic consensus emerges during a clin-
ical trial that the experimental treatment is effective, the trial must be
altered so that the treatment also can be provided to the control group.
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Surveillance committees have been created for this purpose; they follow
treatment results and make decisions about whether an early halt to a
study might be appropriate. The need to stop an RCT because of proof
of efcacy demonstrates that health improvement is valued over research
outcomes. The belief that people should not serve as guinea pigs for sci-
ence partly springs fromrecent events in which they did (for example, the
Tuskegee syphilis study that involved withholding treatment over decades
to infected but uninformed African American men, as well as the Nazi
medical experiments performed on concentration camp prisoners).
If, as part of their rationale, controlled trials require scientic uncer-
tainty about proper treatment, they also depend on public consensus that
participation in a trial brings potential benets and justiable risks to the
participant. The pharmaceutical industry is a major source of funding for
RCTs, and pharmaceutical companies are increasingly having for-prot
research rms run these trials rather than teaching hospitals and medical
schools. Patient enrollment practices have been questioned as corporate
prots become more important than the search for knowledge. Phar-
maceutical research also is complex these days because advocacy groups
apply pressure on pharmaceutical companies and the federal government
to develop new treatments. These groups try to track the availability of
new treatments that might be useful for their members, and many even
maintain databases showing what types of patients are still needed to fulll
enrollment requirements for ongoing clinical trials. One quite new force
in the clinical trial process is the presence of patient advocacy groups
such as ACT UP for AIDS patients (L owy 2000), or Little People of
America or the National Marfan Association in new genetic therapy re-
search (Rapp et al. 2001). When antiretroviral medications were rst be-
ing tested on HIV patients, joining a clinical trial advertised by a patient
advocacy group was the best way to get treatment. In this case, however,
patients were really only interested in joining the group likely to receive
treatment, which conicts with the studys randomization component.
One way researchers deal with this pressure is to create designs where
patients cross over from one study arm to the other after a predeter-
mined period. People rst assigned to receive active medications might
later be switched to placebos instead, whereas those in the placebo arm
would later get active treatment. In this variant of the research as so-
cial exchange model the researchers are creating designs to respond to
patients desire for treatments. Patients want some treatment rather than
no treatment, even when the treatment has not been proven effective and
may turn out to be harmful.
Asimilar dynamic can be seen when research staff fail to describe study
options equally to potential enrollees. This is particularly important when
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a randomized controlled trial includes an intensive monitoring armin ad-
dition to treatment arms because many sick people are unlikely to accept
equal chances that they will receive an intervention or nothing at all.
How potential research subjects think about consenting or refusing to
participate in an RCT is still poorly understood. One in-depth qualita-
tive study based on interviews with parents of critically ill newborns who
were asked to participate in a clinical trial showed that they often did not
understand the randomization process or its rationale (Snowdon et al.
1997). Furthermore, research staff sometimes inadvertently allowed par-
ents to assume they were promoting a new treatment over conventional
treatment. An innovative design in England explored and resolved this
dilemma by embedding a trial within a qualitative research project. In-
depth interviews explored how study recruiters interpreted study infor-
mation, and audiotape recordings of actual recruitment sessions explored
how recruiters presented study information. The researchers found that
early in the study the recruiters presented the active treatment options
rst, describing them as aggressive and curative, whereas they presented
the monitoring last and described it as watchful waiting (Donovan
et al. 2002:768). As the analysis progressed, recommendations for how
to change presentation strategies were circulated to all the study centers.
Among the many changes suggested was a substitution of the phrase ac-
tive monitoring for the prior watchful waiting. Over time patients will-
ingness to be randomized to any study arm increased from 40% of those
approached to 70%. The study methods also allowed the researchers to
explore other ways in which the condence of recruiters inuenced pa-
tient decisions.
B. Why RCT Designs Limit Intervention Possibilities
RCTs play a large role in evidence-based medicine, a trend linking
contemporary research and clinical practice in which signicant treat-
ments are assessed using clinical trials and then compared according to
their cost and efcacy. The power of RCT designs is both statistical and
social. Analyses of aggregate datasets describing multiple groups of peo-
ple from different study populations (so-called meta-analyses) often limit
their data sources to clinical trials so that only the most robust ndings
are analyzed. This restricts the theoretical models that can be employed
and the types of data that become admissible as evidence.
RCTs are a newtype of technology in epidemiology, popular especially
in the past three decades. Those who do cultural studies of science have
pointed out that although new technology often allows new things to be
seen, it also facilitates an interpretation that what one has newly seen is
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something that is natural rather than something translated through the
technology. The difculty of using RCTs to study the health impact of
social networks, neighborhoods, and inequality makes these inuences
seem unproven, and therefore less scientic. But in fact it is the mis-
match between the theme and the research design that makes the data
difcult to obtain, not some underlying weakness in the theme.
The historical exclusion of women from many clinical trials of cardio-
vascular disease until the 1980s is another example of how technology
makes results seem natural. Because the female risk was perceived to
be low, it was measured infrequently and allowed to become largely invis-
ible. The U.S. National Institutes of Health are now trying to eliminate
such imbalances, making executive rulings (a form of administrative in-
tervention) that force researchers to include all potential groups at risk
or to justify any exclusions. We are likely to see more health problems
and new risks among women, minorities, and children in the future, not
because there are new epidemics and risks but because these groups were
neglected in past research.
All intervention trials that involve randomized controlled designs face
a common challenge. To distribute baseline differences evenly among
individuals or communities, they must randomly assign individuals or
communities to either intervention or control groups. But if statistical
analyses are to be valid, the unit of randomization must be the same as
the unit of analysis. When individuals are randomized to an intervention,
results should be based on statistics about individuals, as in the propor-
tion of individuals responding to experimental treatment X compared
with those responding to placebo Y. And when groups or communities
or cities are randomized to interventions, then groups or communities
or cities should be the unit of analysis. This creates two problems. First,
randomization of a limited number of communities to intervention and
control groups does not guarantee equal distribution of baseline char-
acteristics among individuals in those communities. Second, the health
outcomes of individuals in a community receiving an intervention should
not be seen as independent of one another, although the statistical tests
used to compare rates among individuals commonly assume such inde-
pendence (Kirkwood et al. 1997).
If whole communities are chosen as units of intervention and re-
searchers are interested in the average level of some outcome variable like
cardiovascular disease rates, analyses should rst aggregate those rates by
community. Then the distribution of those rates can be compared across
intervention and control communities. This design requirement has dra-
matic implications for study complexity and cost, since randomizing 10
or 16 or 30 communities and managing separate interventions in half of
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them is far more complex than assuming one can count all individuals in
one community as experimental subjects and all the individuals in the
other as control subjects. If a study includes one intervention commu-
nity and one control community, it really has just two units of study, not
the total number of individuals in those two units.
Researchers have developed ways to deal with the statistical and de-
sign issues confronting community-based interventions. One can take
multiple measures of change in each community over time, for example,
or match each intervention community with a control community, or
compare those within each community who adopt the intervention with
those who do not (for additional options, see Kirkwood et al. 1997). But
these complexities themselves are another reason why controlled trials of
community interventions are uncommon.
RCTs often are not useful for assessing social and economic inuences
on health. In the 1970s and 1980s there were large RCTs in the United
States of income maintenance, housing allowances, and worker training
programs (Oakely 1998). But these were generally outside the health
eld, tested alternative program designs, and analyzed data at the level
of the individual rather than the community. The cost and complexity
of controlled trials further limit the types of research questions they are
generally employed to answer. Complex social forces like social networks,
neighborhood effects, or social inequality cannot be randomly assigned
to individuals, and they cannot be withheld.
On the other hand, medication effects, surgical outcomes, and even
some types of behavioral interventions can readily be evaluated using
RCT designs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has re-
cently begun to evaluate preventive interventions (Guide to Community
Preventive Services), giving high priority to data from randomized trials
just like evidence-based medicine. But some experts predict that as a re-
sult the Guide will contain fewer data on true community interventions
and more on interventions directed at individuals or small groups (Green
and Kreuter 2000).
One form of RCT increasingly used in studies of global health is the
multicenter RCT. Multicenter RCTs involve gathering large numbers of
patients from different research centers, sometimes even across multiple
countries, applying the same intervention in each site, and then eval-
uating the interventions effect based on the pooled populations of all
experimental subjects and all controls across all the sites at once. They
decrease the time required to carry out the trial and increase the general-
izability and power of the results. Multicenter RCT designs also impose
limitations on researchers. For example, patients at a site actually can
come from a broad range of social and cultural backgrounds. But patient
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variety attributable to differences across contributing centers is seen more
as a hindrance than a benet because the more varied the patients are,
the harder it is to generalize across them. So efforts are made to keep
study protocols and intervention processes as simple and standardized as
possible. This limits the types of interventions that are capable of being
assessed in this format, and it limits local researchers abilities to adapt
global interventions to their local contexts. Only certain types of inter-
ventions can pass through this new and popular form of epidemiologic
assessment. The design drives the types of questions that can be asked,
rather than the other way around.
Because the RCT is such an important and respected technology, it
has the power to dictate the types of interventions that are recommended
(specically because they have been proven in controlled trials) or not
(e.g., those that cannot be easily assessed through controlled trials). The
RCT is indeed a powerful tool, but this section has argued that over-
reliance on it as the most authoritative source of evidence can have the
effect of limiting the imagination and impeding public health progress.
V. Conclusion
Opportunities for partnership among social scientists and epidemiolo-
gists are pervasive when public health interventions move to address
population-level contexts and concerns. Todays interventions are in-
creasingly designed to be collaborative: research topics address issues of
mutual concern, potential participants are involved in the study design,
and those who design intervention strategies are less presumptuous about
anticipating the correct direction of behavioral change that ought to re-
sult. These are positive trends from an anthropological point of view, for
anthropologists have long suggested that local populations and affected
individuals must be involved in intervention projects. It is therefore grat-
ifying to see that many community-based health interventions take place
today only after local professionals and residents have had a chance to
comment on and revise procedures.
On the other hand, anthropologists also would predict that any recom-
mendation to change behavior would encounter opposition from those
stakeholders who benet from its presence. Even when produced collab-
oratively by local professionals and residents, those television campaigns
to reduce smoking, drinking, and obesity that I see on television at 3 ..
in foreign cities are more than offset by the evening advertisements for
cigarettes, alcohol, and fast food stores.
This chapter continues the theme woven throughout this book
that epidemiological assumptions, techniques, and conclusions reect
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sociocultural inuences. Health intervention projects may be the most
signicant and most problematic use of contemporary epidemiology.
As intervention designs focus more on environmental interventions and
legislation, their impact becomes at once broader and larger. Recom-
mended revisions of legislation and modications of environment are
more widespread and far-reaching, and therefore more controversial or
confusing. The public can interpret controversial recommendations as
uncertainty rather than advancement, reducing or complicating the ef-
cacy of some intervention initiatives. This dilemma is explored in the
next chapter.
FOR FURTHER READING
Hahn R., ed. 1999. Anthropology in Public Health. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Paul B. D., ed. 1955. Health, Culture, and Community: Case Studies of Public Re-
actions to Health Programs. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Rose G. 1992. The Strategy of Preventive Medicine. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Smedley B. D. and S. L. Syme, eds. 2000. Promoting Health: Intervention Strate-
gies from Social and Behavioral Research. Institute of Medicine. Washington, DC:
National Academy Press.
Sobo E. J. 1995. Choosing Unsafe Sex: AIDS-risk Denial among Disadvantaged
Women. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
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7 Perceiving and Representing Risk
Epidemiologists came under increasingly critical public scrutiny in the
1990s. In 1993 the Lancet published an editorial with the provocative
heading Do epidemiologists cause epidemics? It inquired whether epi-
demiologists were making too many errors in their calculations of disease
burden and causation, and whether the public was placing excessive con-
dence in and deriving excessive anxiety from epidemiological results.
A 1995 news report in the journal Science, titled Epidemiology faces
its limits, began with this devastating sentence: The news about health
risks comes thick and fast these days, and it seems almost constitutionally
contradictory (Taubes 1995:164). As the cartoon in Figure 7.1 makes
clear, epidemiology has increasing presence in the mass media, but its
recommendations for how to maintain health and avoid disease seem ar-
bitrary and subject to rapid change. Yet people seek more information
about risk even if they do not quite know what it is.
Epidemiology has, until recently, been an accepted source of evidence
in many countries about how to identify and reduce disease risk. But
that disciplinary authority is increasingly contested by representatives of
private industry, government, and the public, who struggle to establish
their own denitions of risk and rational solutions to the problem of risk.
Because their messages are no longer broadcast only within the profes-
sion, epidemiologists growing engagement in public affairs raises the
stakes for the discipline. This public engagement is beginning to cause a
struggle over how epidemiologists should present their claims and how
much control they can or should exert over the dissemination of scientic
ndings.
I. Popular and Professional Ideas about Risk
Anthropological research on classication and knowledge production can
help shed light on this problem. In addition to their descriptions of dis-
ease burden, epidemiologists and other public health scientists produce
public messages about one key topic: risk. Risk is the rhetorical vehicle
150
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Popular and Professional Ideas about Risk 151
Figure 7.1. Medical news cartoon. Borgman, J. The Cincinnati Inquirer,
1997. Reprinted with special permission of King Features Syndicate.
health scientists use to project the past and the present into the future. As
Paul Slovic, an American risk perception expert trained in psychology,
points out,
Danger is real, but risk is socially constructed. Risk assessment is inherently sub-
jective and represents a blending of science and judgment with important psycho-
logical, social, cultural, and political factors. . . . Whoever controls the denition
of risk controls the rational solution to the problem at hand. If you dene risk one
way, then one option will rise to the top as the most cost-effective, or the safest,
or the best. If you dene it another way, perhaps incorporating qualitative char-
acteristics and other contextual factors, you will likely get a different ordering of
your action solutions. Dening risk is thus an exercise in power. (Slovic 1997:95)
Popular andprofessional ideas about risk oftendiffer. Laypeople appear
to think they can live lives free of risk, whereas scientists face pressures to
phrase their results in terms of risk instead of rates or ratios. It has been
suggested that there is an epidemic of risk itself in clinical journals,
going beyond new terminology to reect changing cultural ideas about
what factors lie under human control (Skolbekken 1995). Because risk,
menace, and safety are an inherent part of what health scientists com-
municate to the public, their communication of these concepts must be
improved.
Risk is the concept used by health scientists to transforma series of indi-
vidual disease states (e.g., smokers who get lung cancer and nonsmokers
who get lung cancer) into a single group measure (e.g., relative risk of
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getting lung cancer for smokers compared with nonsmokers). Based on
some particular study of living or deceased members of some population,
epidemiologists produce estimates of the likelihood of future disease or
dysfunction. Yet risk is a particularly problematic vehicle for conveying
scientic data because it has clear but divergent meanings to scientists
and the general public. Risk for scientists is an estimate of probability or
likelihood of occurrence based on comparisons. Risk for the general pub-
lic is a synonym of menace and danger: one takes risks, one risks ones
life.
The statistical probabilities used to express risk do not make a great
deal of intuitive sense to most individuals. One may be told one has a
10-fold increased risk of developing lung cancer as a smoker compared
with a nonsmoker, but in the end a smoker gets cancer or does not,
and a nonsmoker gets cancer or does not. Probabilities are not easily
perceived; the unroped climber poised on a small rock crystal high above
the groundsenses danger because his ngers are beginning to tremble, not
because he has some inherent sense that his lifetime probability of having
a serious accident is 0.01. Andthat climber knows full well that his lifetime
probability of dying is 1 if he is to meet death early, why not have the
encounter on his own terms? In this case the certainty of eventual death
must be weighed against the certainty of present pleasure and possibility
of early death. And so he adjusts his grip and keeps climbing. Up.
In some ways people do not seem to do a very good job at estimating
the health risk posed by their environment or their behavior. They are
anxious about (unlikely) large disasters with catastrophic consequences
and forget about (quite probable) exposure to more common but smaller-
scale accidents or health problems. That is, they worry more about dying
in an airplane crash than dying in their car on the way to the airport, and
they think nuclear radiation causes more cancer than radon gas. They are
more concerned about the risks of their children having peanut allergies
than of being obese. The media make much of new diseases such as West
Nile virus, Lyme Disease, or SARS but do not sensationalize the real
mass murderers called heart disease and cancer.
But, as the next section shows, in other ways people do an excellent job
of estimating their risk. Their estimates of risk are strongly inuenced by
their social characteristics as well as their knowledge of a behavior or the
comparison they are asked to make between behaviors. What motivates
people to change is not the abstract risk of contracting a disease but rather
the real risk a disease would pose to their plans and dreams (White 1999).
As we have seen throughout this book, it is complex and difcult
to translate information about the acquisition of disease within popu-
lations into information about the avoidance of disease for individuals.
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In fact, some of the most interesting recent work on risk communication
comes from the disciplines of psychology, engineering, and public pol-
icy, where researchers are devoted both to understanding and bridging
differences between professional and public worldviews of what is dan-
gerous and what can be changed. These works represent high levels of
interdisciplinarity: a Mental Models Approach to risk communication
developed by engineers and psychologists (Morgan et al. 2002) looks
similar to some of the social science efforts described in this chapter.
A book attempting to show objective comparisons among 50 different
types of risks (related to home or work, the environment, or health
and medicine) uses both epidemiological and toxicological data (Ropeik
and Gray 2002). And a special issue of the British Medical Journal (see
Edwards 2003) contains articles written by clinicians, risk communica-
tion experts, sociologists, policy analysts, and others describing a variety
of ways physicians can communicate risk levels to their patients. In short,
many disciplinary voices are now talking about how best to transmit data
on risk to the general population.
Popular and Lay Epidemiology
Descriptions of howepidemiologists gather data about risk would usually
begin with the epidemiologists top-down perspective. But here I would
like to take a bottom-up approach in keeping with the theory that people
create risk, perceptions of risk, and professional rules to manage and con-
trol knowledge about risk. So I begin with popular epidemiology and
lay epidemiology, two concepts relevant for increasing the disciplines
engagement with the populace. The following sections briey describe
what these mean, and then they discuss some ways that anthropological
research, and hybrid work in cultural epidemiology, might usefully extend
these notions beyond their original territory.
Popular epidemiology was dened in 1992 as the process by which
laypersons gather scientic data and other information, and also direct
and marshal the knowledge and resources of experts in order to under-
stand the epidemiology of disease (Brown 1992:269). There are strong
precursors to this denition, for example, books written for nonprofes-
sionals about how to investigate environmental hazards (Brown et al.
1990; Legator et al. 1985; Legator and Strawn 1993). Popular epidemi-
ology grows out of the publics growing involvement in environmental
health concerns. Community residents begin to share information about
local health problems, link exposure to local pollutants, organize formal
investigations, and interact with supportive and opposing groups in gov-
ernment, academe, and industry (Brown 1992:26970).
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Figure 7.2. Distribution of childhood leukemia cases in Woburn,
Massachusetts. Available online at: http://www.geology.ohio-state.edu/
courtroom/leuk41g.jpg. Woburn telephone directory map copyright by
JFL Publishing.
Popular epidemiology sometimes starts with disease outbreaks repre-
sented on maps. Geographic descriptions of wind vectors and disease risk
are familiar in studies of nuclear mishaps like the Chernobyl reactor melt-
down or accidental chemical releases like Bhopal in India. But they also
are important focal points for community self-study when neighborhood
residents suspect the presence of cancer or other disease clusters.
Such a map played a central role in a famous lawsuit in Woburn,
Massachusetts, fought over whether childhood leukemia cases were
caused by toxic chemicals in local polluted wells. (See the book [Harr
1996] andthe movie ACivil Action.) The case beganwhena mother began
to map the presence of what she perceived to be surprisingly high numbers
of children with leukemia in her neighborhood. That map (see Figure 7.2)
played a key role in attracting the attention of scientists, lawyers, and
public ofcials.
The map is particularly interesting because it prompts viewers to as-
sume that these cases are clustered in time and space, and that the cluster
has some connection to the two nearby wells. Note that the map contains
no reference to the size of the underlying population or the length of
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exposure to the water, nor does it display the distribution of cases further
away from the wells. Readers actually cannot use it to draw conclusions
about whether these cases of childhood leukemia represent larger totals
than what might be expected for a population of this size in this area. Yet
it still prompts attention.
Maps draw attention in popular epidemiology because they represent
data in familiar form. Unlike statistical data on risk and exposure, maps
show readers where objects or people are located in relation to sites that
they can see or readily imagine. Most people work with maps all their lives,
so they know or think they know how to interpret their messages and
meanings. A newspaper reporter made this point about local residents
construction of maps of breast cancer on Long Island, New York:
It started in a few small towns where the breast cancer rate seemed suspiciously
high. Anxious residents would record newcases on homemade maps, noting their
proximity to dry cleaners, factories, wells or anything else that might have made
their neighbors sick. Now, lawmakers have set aside $1 million for a statewide
cancer mapping project, the rst of its kind in the nation. (Goodnough 1998:30)
This is another example where a homemade map creates initial attention
and is followed by more rigorous and professional renditions of data.
Popular epidemiology promotes the publics use of scientic epidemi-
ological methods. It justies the publics role in studying health concerns
before professionals give them (both the public and the concerns) cred-
ibility. But it does not promote using epidemiologic methods to study
problems that fall outside professional denitions: It is obviously nec-
essary to evaluate the correctness of ndings that result from popular
epidemiology. Such knowledge is not folk knowledge with an antiscien-
tic basis. In most cases, popular epidemiology ndings are the result of
scientic studies involving trained professionals, even if they begin as lay
mapping of disease clusters without attention to base rates or controls
(Brown 1992:2778). Popular epidemiology describes community mobi-
lization to bring health issues to light, to involve epidemiologists in studies
of these issues, and to collect relevant data with or without professional
assistance.
Some epidemiologists do accept and promote using their methods to
study lay health concerns. Lay epidemiology has been dened by an in-
terdisciplinary British group as a scheme in which individuals interpret
health risks through the routine observation and discussion of cases of
illness and death in personal networks and the public arena, as well as
from formal and informal evidence arising from other sources, such as
television and magazines (Frankel et al. 1991:428). Lay epidemiology
reects peoples deep awareness of some types of personal and short-term
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risks, for example, the increased likelihood that they will have an automo-
bile accident if they drive while drunk. But Frankel and colleagues argue
that people are less concerned by more distant and long-term risks, such
as the increased risk of heart disease from excess fat consumption. They
have more recently used the concept of lay epidemiology to argue that
disadvantaged groups in industrialized countries are acting rationally by
not stopping smoking because the act of smoking helps them cope with
stress and they are necessarily more focused on survival in the short rather
than the long term (Lawlor et al. 2003). Lay epidemiology thus empha-
sizes the validity of local knowledge about risk, knowledge that puts risk
in context.
Some creative strategies have been developed that can be used to visu-
alize lay epidemiology among rural and nonliterate populations. Robert
Chambers work with Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) is one of
the best-known examples of using graphic forms of information col-
lection and display in participatory evaluation in developing countries
(Chambers 1997). PRA practitioners work with rural villagers to pro-
duce maps of crop use and soil quality, bar charts of seasonal differences
in production and household income, and cluster diagrams of wealth
ranking or medicinal uses of local plants. They do this through innova-
tive strategies that rely on public production of data and use of available
and familiar materials. For example, a PRA team might ask villagers to
draw a map of their village in the dirt of the central square. They would
ask passersby to check and improve it and might also ask them to use
sticks or rocks to indicate household locations, land that is fertile and
infertile, or places where children live who do not attend school. Over
the course of a day an accurate map can be produced that can assist land
use planning or school siting, or identify disabled children. Or they might
ask locals to make a graph on the ground of a years time, divided up into
locally important units like months, climate changes, or growing seasons.
They would then ask people to indicate during which seasons agricultural
products were planted, harvested, or sold, when money was circulating
or in short supply, when people tended to run out of food. Each of these
diagrams (the rst a map, the second a bar chart) subsequently could be
transferred to paper for safekeeping.
Two important points can be made about this work: rural villagers are
able to produce sophisticated graphic displays of their knowledge, and
they can be treated as active participants in a research process rather
than passive subjects of a research study. These mapping and graphing
techniques require, or at least allow, a creative formof interaction between
professional and villager or professor and student. When used to describe
health-related data they form an interesting combination of popular and
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lay epidemiology: these methods can be used to represent a broad array of
local health concerns, not only those of interest to visiting outsiders. But
they also rely on local people and materials and knowledge to produce
health-related data about their own specic place.
Anthropologists also have offered some good examples of the impor-
tance of lay epidemiology. Rayna Rapps article about womens willing-
ness to undergo amniocentesis uses the termcommunity epidemiology
for what has been called lay epidemiology here. (See also Rapp 1999.)
Many womenwithout a high degree of scientic literacy have developeda practical
sense of community epidemiology. Enfolding their own reproductive health into
that of kin and friends, they say [about whether to undergo amniocentesis], I
dont smoke, I dont do drugs. My mother had my sister when she was forty, my
sisters, they all had late babies, healthy babies. My friends, theyre all ne. Im
healthy, I dont need this test. (Rapp 1998:154155)
This kind of statement points to the (largely unnoticed) role that pub-
lic interpretation of epidemiologic data already plays in guiding health
behavior. The details of this process of interpretation may not quite con-
formto scientists desires, but the process nonetheless resembles an active
comparison between personal experience and external evidence.
The emergence of popular and lay epidemiology remind health scien-
tists that they should pay more attention to types of knowledge and power
that circulate outside of professional boundaries. But these two concepts
represent different approaches to public engagement and public knowl-
edge. To further emphasize this difference, we could call popular epi-
demiology community-controlled epidemiology and lay epidemiology
the epidemiology of local knowledge. Using the term community-
controlled epidemiology emphasizes that expertise useful in standard
epidemiological research projects also resides among those who are not
professionally trained; using the term epidemiology of local knowledge
emphasizes that epidemiological research methods also can be applied to
nonbiomedical illness labels.
An Example of Community-Controlled epidemiology in Canada
Who has the right to measure and to construct portraits of sickness
and health in communities? Epidemiology is a tool often used by the
nation-state and dominant groups within nation-states to describe and
dene the health problems of the powerless. In Canada, an anthropolo-
gist and a group of aboriginal collaborators helped to shape a government
epidemiology initiative to design a National Longitudinal Aboriginal
Health Survey (ONeil et al. 1998). They sought to make a survey that
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would improve on the more typical research approach to Native American
communities, where outsiders describe these communities as sick, disor-
ganized, and dependent.
As we saw in Chapter 6, it is dangerous to assume that a scientist
works with one monolithic community rather than a community fac-
tionalized by competing voices and interests. For example, the Canadian
group needed to account for the possibility that women would report
and request services for health concerns that differed fromthose reported
and requested by men. In similar fashion, aboriginal health workers who
sought to reinforce local knowledge wanted to describe and measure lo-
cal healing practices, but they also were concerned that questions about
traditional healing might offend community members who followed evan-
gelical Christian practices.
The design process began with a series of workshops in different Cana-
dian cities to consult with aboriginal health technicians working with abo-
riginal organizations and communities (ONeil et al. 1998). Most of the
participants initially were critical of the notion that more research needed
to be done on aboriginal communities, but they eventually voiced support
for a health survey if aboriginal peoples maintained control of funds, ques-
tion content, implementation, analysis, and dissemination. They wanted
the survey to produce information that would be both trustworthy at the
community level and credible to scientists and government ofcials.
To respond to these concerns, a set of regional surveys and regional
steering committees was created. A core set of questions was developed
for use in all regions, but opportunities were created for each region to
add its own questions. The regional steering committees then contracted
with local consultants and universities to undertake the survey work (First
Nations and Inuit Regional Health Survey National Steering Committee
1999). In the province of Manitoba, for example, eight aboriginal univer-
sity students were hired to interview key stakeholders about health issues
and concerns in all 61 First Nations in the province (ONeil et al. 1998).
They were trained both by university researchers and by Tribal Councils.
In Manitoba, 17 communities were selected by the steering commit-
tee and invited to participate, and 34 community residents were selected
by their communities to be interviewers. Because resident listings in na-
tive communities are politically contentious, usually condential, and not
necessarily up to date, the survey sample was drawn from houses ran-
domly selected from a map of each community. The response rate was
81%, showing the strong community support for the survey. (National
response rates for the Canadian Community Health Survey are about
85%, excluding residents of aboriginal reserves [B eland et al. 2001].)
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Epidemiologic studies can be designed in partnership with communi-
ties, and even communities that are hostile to further research can collab-
orate effectively when they have a chance to inuence research objectives
and procedures. More details of this studys content can be found on
the website of the University of Manitobas Center for Aboriginal Health
Research.
An Example of the Epidemiology of Local Knowledge in Mexico
Following his training inepidemiology at the University of NorthCarolina
(see Chapter 2), medical anthropologist Arthur Rubel became interested
in using epidemiologic techniques to study what it means in other cul-
tures to become ill. He picked a condition fairly common in Mexico, susto,
which has causal explanations and management strategies that would be
quite unfamiliar to most biomedical practitioners in the United States.
Susto is caused by fright or other strong emotion; its victims are thought
to lose a vital part of themselves in this process (Rubel et al. 1984).
The condition can develop after near-drownings, falls, or other accidents;
sightings of snakes; physical threats; and other surprising or stress-laden
events. Its victims sleep restlessly and also are listless, debilitated, de-
pressed, andindifferent to foodandto dress andpersonal hygiene (Rubel
et al. 1984:6). It can be treated through ceremonies designed to identify
the event that caused the vital part to depart, and then to return the vital
substance to the body.
Rubels rst article on this topic argued that epidemiologic techniques
could be used to describe the prevalence and causes of nonbiomedical dis-
ease categories (1964). In his later interdisciplinary study (1984), Rubel
and colleagues compared the causes, management, and outcomes of susto
among three distinctly different groups in Mexico. They concluded that
people who suffered from susto also had relatively high levels of biological
disease and tended to die prematurely. But they were careful to point
out that susto could not be reduced to any single biomedical condition,
rather it seemed to indicate a combination of impaired ability to perform
critical tasks and the presence of a broad variety of biological diseases. As
they put it, people suffering from susto were forced to the sidelines by
excessive demands on their adaptive resources (1984:122). There were
differences across the communities in the type of symptoms associated
with susto and also differences across them in the level of disease burden
susto posed. These studies by Rubel were important predecessors to the
studies of nervios and ataques mentioned in the rst chapter of this book
and to many other labels for human suffering that do not t standard
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biomedical categories. In short, they show that biomedical denitions
need not always form the diagnostic core of epidemiology.
Implications of Popular and Lay Epidemiology for Practice
Epidemiological research is increasingly complex and open to debate
both within and outside the discipline. For example, epidemiologists ar-
gue against other epidemiologists when policies to limit antibiotic use or
reduce smoking are debated. The elds legitimacy as science also is in-
creasingly questioned by other experts as it progresses from description
to intervention, and as it shifts its attention from the habits of citizens to
the production practices of industries.
People working within the framework of community-controlled epi-
demiology could argue that community participation in disease surveil-
lance increases the relevance and quality of that science. Those working
within the epidemiology of local knowledge could argue that communi-
ties draw on multiple sources of expertise outside of biomedical science
when establishing what risks matter and what can be done about them.
The challenge to both these approaches is that many health risks today
are broadly distributed, complex, and hard to measure. Many individ-
uals feel menaced by these risks. But it is not only individuals who feel
menaced: industry, entire communities, developers, and governments
have disparate and often conicting interests in measuring disease and
risk burdens. A prediction two decades ago about the future of epidemi-
ology in the year 2000 (Rothman 1981) held that epidemiologists would
end up debating those risks in the courtroom rather than in the scientic
literature. That has happened sometimes, but an equally large challenge
to epidemiology is that the public now sees health risks as pervasive but
contradictory components of the environment, and it is capable of dis-
missing them as scientic confusion. Public exposure to epidemiologic
ndings may not always bring deeper understanding. Such exposure also
does not necessarily create public pressure for greater relevance and qual-
ity in epidemiologic research.
Epidemiologists measure risks and bring them to public attention,
yet this very process causes their authority to be increasingly debated.
The Lancet editorial asking Do epidemiologists cause epidemics? de-
scribed the dangers resulting when epidemiologic mistakes like improper
age standardization and poorly chosen denominators are compounded
by the disciplines popularity with editors, both medical and in the
tabloid press (1993:993). Epidemiologys renown poses benets and
hindrances: many are listening, but errors and overblown claims can be
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Communicating about Risk, Menace, and Safety 161
spread as broadly and quickly as well-founded and carefully interpreted
results.
Popular and lay epidemiology face different challenges in their efforts
to link professionals and nonprofessionals. One major weakness of popu-
lar epidemiology is its assumption that citizen participation means citizen
adoption of professional concerns and standards. When the public per-
ceives itself as menaced rather than merely at risk and it wants to reduce
the threat, it can react in the realms both of science and politics. In the
longer termthe public can pressure legislators to invest in health research,
and in the shorter term it can pressure them to create new programs and
special investigations. In an ironic twist, politicians often then transfer the
public perception of risk from their political realm back to the scientic
realm, by calling for expert reviews and commissions. Expert committees
can validate a sense of public menace by nding some statistically, polit-
ically, and clinically signicant risk factor, or they can dismiss a risk as
being indistinguishable from chance. This type of move often buys time
for politicians, but it seldom addresses the publics fear (see Nash and
Kirsch 1986).
Advocates of lay epidemiology understand this because they are willing
to accord legitimacy to popular perceptions that may not be consistent
with scientic evidence. But they face their own challenges when they ar-
gue that worldviews are legitimate even when they depart from, ignore, or
contest biomedical assumptions about disease causation and taxonomy.
A large challenge to epidemiology of any type is the ability of interest
groups to mobilize politically for change even when most health profes-
sionals doubt the evidence, as seen in the United States in the silicone
breast implant controversy or concerns about the health risks posed by
video display units, high-tension power lines, immunizations, or uori-
dated water.
II. Communicating about Risk, Menace, and Safety
Anthropological Offerings
Anthropologists have spent a fair amount of time analyzing and critiquing
epidemiological concepts of risk and perceived risk (DiGiacomo 1999,
Gifford 1986, Nations 1986). In an important study of the social impact
and cultural meanings of prenatal diagnosis, anthropologist Rayna Rapp
interviewed a broad variety of groups involved in developing, collecting,
assessing, and deciding what to do with the results of prenatal tests, in-
cluding pregnant women who accepted or refused the tests, geneticists,
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genetic counselors, lab technicians, and families of children who have the
disabilities revealed by the tests. She explored the language used in coun-
seling sessions, explaining that positive family histories meant negative
things to counselors, whereas uneventful pregnancies indicatedno need
for further testing.
According to Rapp, the terminology of genetic counseling is played
out in a series of scripts that convey scientic information, collect and
classify patient knowledge, or move back and forth between these in an in-
teraction designed to address patients concerns (1999:63). Rapps close
analysis of these different objectives helps show how counselors adapt
their metaphors and choose levels of technical complexity depending on
their assessments of their audience. But Rapp also explores the function
of statistics as a genre of communication that requires interpretation
and shapes client perceptions, a genre that is comfortable and available
to educated patients but quite alien and unreal to the uneducated. She
writes of a homegrown sense of statistics that links personal experi-
ence to more general statistical pictures (1999:69). Her analysis reveals
the processes through which epidemiologic data become reinterpreted by
counselors and their clients.
Epidemiologists are very concerned with the accuracy of their data, but
they tend not to be as concerned with the dissemination and interpreta-
tion of data subsequent to their scientic reports in journals. Yet diffusion
is accompanied by important symbolic transformations: individuals rein-
terpret scientic reports according to their own experience and systems
of meaning. Some compare the abstract risks of getting diabetes or heart
disease in the future to the real-life pleasures of eating and drinking today.
Others decide to rebuild their home for a third time on the ood plain
because they like the view. Still others purchase water lters to reduce
their health risk from chemical exposure but ignore the fact that their l-
ters do not screen out the more common and deadly bacterial pathogens
that cause diarrheal disease.
Organizations (companies, lobbying groups, governments) repackage
and redistribute scientic reports to serve their objectives. Reports of
risk and benet almost invariably improve the commercial or political
status of some interest groups while reducing the status of others. It is no
wonder, then, that the scientic and legislative battles over the dangers
of alcohol abuse, for example, also are expressed as advertising battles
containing images of sexy women and injunctions to drink responsibly
on one side, and images of car wrecks and disgured teenagers on the
other.
Messages about risk can be framed in at least two ways: they can high-
light individual (internal) choices about what actions to take or they can
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highlight external constraints that limit individual freedom to choose
health (Frankenberg 1988). Health is often perceived in the United States
as personal rather than social (Toumey 1996:78), so American messages
about risk tend to highlight individual choice rather than external limits.
Aglance at some of the popular books designed to help people think about
risk shows this bias toward deciding whats really safe and whats really
dangerous in the world around you, which is the subtitle of a book by
Ropeik and Gray (2002). The subtitle suggests that risks exist out there
in the world, but they can be controlled through individual knowledge
and choice.
Risk lls a particular cultural niche in contemporary society. An-
thropologists have long said that non-Western cultures explain misfor-
tune partly through magic and witchcraft. Anthropologist E. E. Evans-
Pritchard wrote in his classic book Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among
the Azande that his African village informants were perfectly capable of
explaining that a raised granary collapsed because termites had eaten
through the supports (Evans-Pritchard 1937). But witchcraft explained
why that particular granary collapsed just when that particular individual
was seated underneath it enjoying the shade. A contemporary social an-
thropologist suggests that the concept of risk plays an equivalent role
in post-industrial Western cultures: where control over ones life has
become increasingly viewed as important, the concept of risk is now
widely used to explain deviations from the norm, misfortune and fright-
ening events (Lupton 1999:3).
Anthropologists have argued that risk should be analyzed using ethno-
graphic methods so that it can be tied to particular times, places, and peo-
ple. In agreement with the quote from Slovic near the beginning of this
chapter, they assert that analyses of risk must attend to power and must
look at peoples involvement in webs of relationships (Caplan 2000:26
27). One example of this is a study of AIDS in northern Tanzania that
argues that epidemiologic research on HIVrisk focuses on easily denable
components of sexual behavior like number of partners and categories of
relationship (Setel 1999). Standard HIV research misses many complex
and changing forms of partnership, duration of spousal separation, and
the social conditions under which some types of relationships are sus-
tained and others unsupported information critical to understanding
why people are exposed to HIV infection (Setel 1999:8386). This is an
example of looking at the risk factors behind the risk factors that was
described in Chapter 6.
Lay epidemiology itself is the subject of new research. Some are ask-
ing howpolicy debates around epidemiologic controversies represent and
include the voices and claims of non-experts (e.g., Moffatt et al. 2000).
P1: KcT/KJS P2: KaD
This work explores what might be done to increase participation and
inuence of non-experts in such debates. Others ask howdifferent groups
use epidemiologic data in conversation, as guides to daily behavior, and
as rationales for self-dened states of health or illness. Some have done
content analyses of epidemiologic news as reported in the mass media
(e.g., Greenberg and Wartenberg 1990). When Bartlett et al. undertook
such a study of research published in two British medical journals and
two popular newspapers, they discovered that randomized clinical trial
designs and results considered to be bad news were less likely to be
published in newspapers, as was any kind of research coming from de-
veloping countries (2002). Much more needs to be known about how
public health data of all kinds are disseminated and circulated within
populations, and how different publics perceive epidemiology and epi-
demiologic data. How does the power and public image of epidemiology
vary between the United States and European nations, or among Mexico,
Brazil, Japan, and Germany? Samples of the medical literature taken from
different countries show varying levels of attention paid to epidemiologic
data (Takahashi et al. 2001).
How Epidemiologists Create Epidemics and Other Reactions
Although epidemiologists might wonder at the hubris of the Lancet ask-
ing if they cause epidemics, anthropologists would readily reply, Why, of
course they do! Most epidemiologists would recoil fromwhat anthropol-
ogists nd quite acceptable: that the publics epidemiologic understand-
ing goes beyond what it knows about epidemiologic method. This public
understanding encompasses what epidemiology is used for and whether
people nd it personally relevant. Anthropologists know that epidemi-
ology produces metaphors even as it produces knowledge about disease
causation and prevention. These metaphors include qualities like safe
sex and good cholesterol, but they also include confusing contradic-
tions between risks and benets of consuming specic foods. Contradic-
tory information puts people in the difcult bind of choosing between
whether to drink red wine to reduce the risk of heart disease or to avoid
red wine to reduce the risk of liver disease. Conicting data about fat
and heart disease create consumer dilemmas about whether to purchase
butter, margarine, or a product cleverly labeled to capitalize on these con-
tradictions, called I Cant Believe Its Not Butter, available in regular
and light versions. Small protective effects of oatmeal on heart dis-
ease or ber on colorectal cancers are rapidly translated into commercial
claims that eating Brand Xcereal with lots of added ber is good for ones
health.
P1: KcT/KJS P2: KaD
Equivalent rifts exist between the number of cases of some diseases
and their perceived menace. The real number of cases of disease that
are major news items such as anthrax, West Nile virus, and Ebola virus is
much smaller than the total of deaths fromthe major killers like lung can-
cer and heart disease in industrialized settings, and childhood infectious
diseases, malaria, and AIDS in developing countries. In sum, epidemi-
ology is known and remembered by the public far more for its claims
and metaphors than for its specic data about relative risk and incidence
rates.
How do epidemiologists create epidemics? Epidemiologists create per-
ceptions of risk in their audiences at least partly by how they describe dis-
ease outcomes. For example, when asked to choose between two cancer
therapies, one group was given data on probability of surviving, the other
on probability of dying (McNeil et al. 1982:1259). When the choice was
phrased in terms of probability of surviving, 18% chose radiation ther-
apy over surgery; when phrased in terms of dying, 44% chose radiation
therapy over surgery. The percentages changed in similar fashion when
physicians answered, with 16% choosing radiation therapy over surgery
when outcomes were expressed as probability of surviving, and 50%when
expressed as probability of dying. It appears that these audiences paid at-
tention to risk phrased as hope rather than despair.
Physicians also react differently to risk whenit is presentedas a dilemma
facing an individual patient compared with the same dilemma facing an
entire group. Rudelmeier and Tversky (1990) presented physicians with
a series of paired clinical scenarios in which one version asked how a
single patient should be treated, and the other version asked how a group
of comparable patients should be treated. They reported that physicians
give more weight to the personal concerns of patients when considering
them as individuals and more weight to general criteria of effectiveness
when considering them as a group (1990:1163). This very likely means
that epidemiologic data meant to guide clinical practice will have more
impact on physicians when described in terms of an individual case than
in terms of a group tendency.
Psychological studies of the interpretation of risk, and perception of
risk as high or low, reveal some consistent differences across groups.
For example, White males consistently perceive the risks of potentially
hazardous activities as lower than both White women and than non-
Whites of both sexes (Slovic 1997:73). Age also makes a difference in
howpeople perceive risk. Young people aged 14 to 22 try smoking primar-
ily because they feel it will relax themand help themfeel good. This is even
more important than their perception about the dangers of smoking
in fact apart from their feelings toward smoking, there is no evidence
P1: KcT/KJS P2: KaD
that recognition of risks deters young people from trying smoking or pro-
gressing toward a smoking habit (Romer and Jamieson 2001b:7071).
Adults, on the other hand, reduce their smoking more as their perception
of its danger increases (Ibid.:71). Given these types of systematic differ-
ences, it is fair to conclude that risk perception is culturally shaped rather
than idiosyncratic.
In fact, most evaluations of hazard perceptions in the United States
nd they can be displayed in two basic dimensions: one axis corresponds
to whether they are known (observable, known to those exposed, of im-
mediate effect, known to science) or not, and the other axis corresponds
to whether they are dreaded (uncontrollable, globally catastrophic, fatal,
involuntary) or not. For example, the hazards of radioactive waste are un-
known and dreaded, nuclear weapons hazards are known and dreaded; bi-
cycle hazards are known and not dreaded, and water uoridation hazards
are unknown and dreaded (Slovic 1987). Studies comparing these per-
ceptions across Poland, the United States, Hungary, and Norway found
essentially the same dimensions used in each country (Goszczynska et al.
1991). As yet, however, there is little other comparative data available
about perceptions of risk in other sites.
III. A Few Lessons and Opportunities
Prior chapters emphasized the importance of risk and communication
even as they attended to issues of denitions, measurements, and inter-
vention designs. This one looked at three different aspects of risk: rst,
how epidemiologists pay attention to public efforts to measure their own
health risks (popular epidemiology); second, howepidemiologic methods
can be used to study suffering and disease entities that may not be de-
ned according to biomedical theories (lay epidemiology); and third, how
epidemiologists and the general public exchange information about risk,
and what happens to scientic claims about probability and likelihood as
they get transmitted from producers to consumers.
The lessons and opportunities offered by popular and lay epidemiology
are linked to how risk is constructed and communicated. The seductive
power of numbers and graphics can divert researchers and readers at-
tention away from the content of messages and toward their form (Tufte
1983). Graphical displays may be the only way to reach some audiences
(Edwards et al. 2002), but others nd them unintelligible or superu-
ous or distracting (Fortin et al. 2001). The pioneering work of Robert
Chambers and others can be taken further into the domain of health,
asking how participatory mapping techniques can better represent neigh-
borhood disease burden and exploring how graphical displays and other
P1: KcT/KJS P2: KaD
methods can convey epidemiologic statistics to poorly educated or even
illiterate populations. These are ways to expand the tools available for
use in popular epidemiology. Disease mapping by community residents
and participatory mapping strategies suggest that there are other oppor-
tunities to employ graphic and geographic methods to bring researchers
and community members closer together. Popular and lay epidemiology
are both experiments in creating more sensitive and profound displays of
the social and cultural patternings of disease across the landscape. They
both describe risk as a collective rather than individual phenomenon.
Epidemiologic results go through many transformations between their
production as statistics, publication and circulation as scientic papers,
popularization through mass media, and absorption by individual citi-
zens. Journalists and the general public both rapidly interpret new data.
These interpretations draw on fundamental beliefs about what types of
activities are dangerous and what levels of risk are acceptable. As health
scientists in all disciplines become more accustomed to dealing with a
broad range of reactions from diverse audiences, they are acquiring skills
in media relations and in writing for the public. They are especially well
served by emphasizing the tentative nature of their results, calling for con-
rmation from other sources and taking care not to overinterpret their
data when transforming statistical estimates of risk into concrete recom-
mendations for treatment or behavioral change.
FOR FURTHER READING
Chambers R. 1997. Whose Reality Counts? Putting the First Last. London: Inter-
mediate Technology Publications.
Douglas M. 1992. Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory. New York:
Routledge.
Slovic P. 1987. Perception of risk. Science 236:280285.
Tufte E. R. 1990. Envisioning Information. Chesire, CT: Graphics Press.
P1: KcT
8 Conclusion
Diseases are strangely intimate disorders, eliciting private sensations and
personal emotions. They also are achingly public experiences, especially
frightening when counting makes them visible. Descriptions of disease
often move back and forth between textual and statistical portrayals, be-
tween pain and hope in individuals, and between cancer rates or life
expectancy in populations. For example, the public was put on notice
by a Time magazine cover in 1998 that blared: THE KILLER GERM.
Its turning up everywhere: in your water, your food, the pool. How to
protect yourself from E. Coli. But the article began with this sentence:
Tammy Lowery couldnt see the blood vessels rupturing in her gut, but
the way she was feeling, she didnt have to. This sensationalized intro-
duction mixes general menace (turning up everywhere) with personal
exposure (your water, your food), and a specic person (Tammy). Jour-
nalistic accounts like this often describe sick individuals as a hook to draw
their readers attention and increase their interest; they present disease
statistics to help their audience feel and perhaps also understand the
magnitude of a health problem.
Health researchers have been far more reluctant than journalists to mix
stories about sick individuals with statistics about disease patterns. Re-
searchers tend to communicate within their own disciplines more than
with others, and most have little or nothing to do with the general public.
They get trained in, and rely on, a limited number of forms of knowl-
edge exchange. This can be detrimental when they seek interdisciplinary
or public conversations, for in these exchanges case histories can be dis-
missed as mere anecdote, just as readily as statistics can be dismissed as
faceless numbers. Researchers and practitioners in population health
can combine individual case reports and statistical accounts without
distorting either one; learning how to do this is difcult, but it can be
effective.
Do I mean that researchers need to become journalists? No. Journal-
ism is a structured way to convert news and information into a com-
pelling story, whereas research is a structured and systematic way to
168
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Conclusion 169
seek knowledge through specied methods. Knowledge is useless if not
communicated, but it is also useless if not understood. And the greatest
health problems confronting the world today, like AIDS, tuberculosis,
childhood infections, lung cancer, heart disease, and stroke, require so-
lutions at least partly based on knowledge from multiple cooperating
disciplines. The limited ability to communicate across disciplines, and
to reach beyond disciplines to the general public, is a substantial part
of the challenge facing those trying to reduce and prevent global health
problems.
Society and culture are xed in the very center of the epidemiologic
categories of person, place, and time. If these categories were used to
explain the origins of the E. coli epidemic they would have to take account
of personal decisions, pathogen mutations, water quality, and corporate
and government policies. Diseases have natural and sociocultural
histories, which must be interwoven if we are to use the origins of disease
as clues to their treatment and prevention.
The contrast between Tammys gut and an E. coli epidemic emphasizes
the complementarity between textual and statistical portrayals of disease.
Disease portraits are built frompersonal decisions as well as virulence and
incidence rates. But of course the relationships between text and statis-
tics and between personal risk and general menace are more complicated
than that. Textual and statistical portrayals each are constructed from
many layers of data. Standard methods of collecting epidemiologic data
also are subject to local inuence, either through research participants
behavior and reactions or through researchers own unexamined assump-
tions about measurement. Public health interventions themselves create
or minimize perceptions of risk and incite or quell responses. So do tex-
tual, numerical, graphical, and geographical pictures of disease and
risk. The polarized difference between statistical and textual descriptions
is more complex than it may rst appear.
The narrative in this book provides many examples of collaborative
projects drawing on theories and methods from both anthropology and
epidemiology. Interdisciplinary studies are emerging from teams of re-
searchers in many places, trained in many disciplines and able to commu-
nicate across them. But any researcher working in one discipline should
be able to use the methods and theories from another, as long as they
understand and use them well. An epidemiologist can include an ethno-
graphic component to explore motivations for behavior change, and an
anthropologist can mount a case-control study to examine the causes of
a folk illness. The types of cross-cutting examples described in this book
have been undertaken by one person borrowing fromboth disciplines, in-
dividuals sharing across disciplines, and groups creating new disciplines.
P1: KcT
170 Conclusion
After the anthrax outbreaks in the United States in 2001, a New Yorker
magazine cartoon portrayed a society woman introducing her epidemi-
ologist to her guests at a fashionable cocktail party. Epidemiologists
are not yet quite this popular, but the results of their research have
surely become indispensable. And recent trends toward evidence-based
medicine make epidemiology more popular in clinical journals than ever
before. Fascinating debates are being played out as clinicians try to eval-
uate their own individual decisions and their own individual training ex-
periences compared with those recommended in RCTs. Much as the
general public is buffeted by conicting news reports about high-risk
foods or preventive health behaviors, buffeted also are medical educators
divided about whether their new curricular experiments can be tested in
controlled trials (Prideaux 2002) and psychiatrists concerned that RCTs
be interpreted along with clinical expertise about a specic individual
(Williams and Garner 2002). What measurements, and what techniques,
produce knowledge that is considered to be valid? These, also, are cultural
questions, and their answers change over time.
I. Epidemiology, Proof and Judgment
Naturally, Dr. Greenberg said, it would have been nice to know for a fact that
the old boys all sat at a certain table and that all of them put about a spoonful
of salt from that particular shaker on their oatmeal, but it wasnt essential. I was
morally certain that they had. There just wasnt any other explanation. (Rouech e
1947 [1980]:112).
Berton Rouech e, writer for three decades of the Annals of Medicine col-
umn for The New Yorker magazine, specialized in dramatizing the disease
outbreak investigations undertaken by state Public Health Departments
and the Communicable Disease Center in Atlanta (forerunner of to-
days Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). Part detective and
part storyteller, Rouech e popularized epidemiology for two generations
of New Yorker readers, showing how epidemiologists traced the causes of
small outbreaks of schistosomiasis, trichinosis, anthrax, histoplasmosis,
tularemia, and other communicable diseases and conditions rarely seen
in the United States. How epidemiologists put evidence together, and
what stories are told about that process, are other important parts of the
relationship between personal risk and general menace.
Rouech e used the strange case of 11 blue men to illustrate how epi-
demiology can solve mysteries. In 1944, 11 elderly vagrant men in New
York City were brought to area hospitals, severely ill and cyanotic (sky-
blue). One died. An epidemiologic investigation showed that the men
were all sickened by a perplexing case of food-poisoning in which they
P1: KcT
Epidemiology, Proof and Judgment 171
became ill within 30 minutes of eating oatmeal at the same restaurant.
The causal agent was sodium nitrite, a dangerous chemical substituted
in small quantities during the war for the more benign meat preserva-
tive sodium nitrate. Sodium nitrite from a large can on a high shelf in
the kitchen was mistakenly used as salt to avor a vat of oatmeal, and
it was mistakenly used to top up one salt shaker at one table in the
restaurant. Those who ate the oatmeal alone did not receive a nitrite
dose large enough to cause symptoms, so epidemiologists concluded that
those who got sick must have avored their breakfast with the adulterated
salt.
The case also shows the role of human values and judgment in the
science and practice of epidemiology. The 11 men were all known to
have eaten the oatmeal, but all were discharged from the hospital before
they could be asked whether they had used extra salt. The epidemiologist
used the pattern of the illness, eldwork in the restaurant, and tests in the
laboratory, to infer the behavioral steps intervening between susceptibility
and sickness. He deduced the causal pathway from the overall pattern of
the illness. There is some paradox in this deduction: the epidemiologist
claims to be morally certain that he has gured out the causal chain,
even in the absence of critical data. The phrase moral certainty is, on
one hand, a nineteenth-century construction meaning proof beyond a
reasonable doubt. To be morally certain means to have decided on the
basis of reason rather than demonstration. In epidemiology that reason is
usually brought to bear on statistical summaries of data. Probabilities are
calculated of how likely it would be that a particular distribution of lung
cancer between smokers and nonsmokers would occur by chance alone.
But is this the same as proof of causation? Tobacco companies argued
successfully for decades that it was not. The competition between the
epidemiologists moral certainty and the publics desire for demonstration
is a fundamental challenge for epidemiology, sometimes interfering with
the ability of the discipline to establish clear proof and to communicate
well with the public.
This contemporary challenge exists partly because epidemiology has
been so successful in discovering the big single risks for the biggest health
problems. But the era of discoveries of large risks is about over: only a
limited number of substances or actions are so injurious that they cause
differences at the magnitude of the 16-fold difference in lung cancer
rates between smokers and nonsmokers. Most health risks explored today
are multifactorial. When found, risk ratios are more on the order of 2-
or 3-fold than 10- or 16-fold (Taubes 1995). Differences smaller than
this can potentially be explained away by design and analysis problems,
so fewer epidemiologic ndings meet with even grudging acceptance.
P1: KcT
172 Conclusion
There are more epidemiologists than ever, making a bigger deal about
smaller risks.
If the big risks have been found, however, this does not mean epi-
demiology has been equally successful at turning those discoveries into
effective therapies and policies. The struggle today is to gure out how to
turn epidemiologic ndings into recommendations for human behavior.
Boldness and humility both are important virtues in this task.
II. Conclusions about Dening Disciplines: Defended Bor-
der versus Semi-permeable Membrane
Many successful and innovative interdisciplinary projects have taken
place over the past century that describe and/or attempt to improve the
health of populations. Anthropologists involvement with epidemiologists
is supported at the beginning of the twenty-rst century by extensive U.S.
and international funding for chronic health risks, infectious diseases, and
international themes related to the survival of children and adults. Con-
tributors to the American Anthropological Associations newsletter have
recommended that introductory and advanced epidemiology should form
part of a core curriculum for graduate medical anthropology students
(American Anthropological Association 1993, 1994). The list of anthro-
pologists who have called for such collaboration is long and growing (for
references see Trostle and Sommerfeld 1996). Whereas 19 anthropolo-
gists were employed in 1996 in Atlanta at the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention the number in 2001 was closer to 43 (J. Carey, personal
communication, 2001). If not yet commonplace, collaboration between
medical anthropologists and epidemiologists is certainly increasing.
This book shows that many interdisciplinary projects are taking place
between anthropologists and epidemiologists, and it argues that dis-
ciplinary attempts to maintain exclusive control over knowledge do-
mains can be counterproductive. Each chapter offers a route to mu-
tual exchange, a way of thinking about disciplinary boundaries as
semi-permeable membranes rather than defended borders. The histor-
ical review shows the legitimacy of projects joining anthropology with
epidemiology: many have studied the causal role society and culture play
in human health, and successful interdisciplinary programs have been
created over the past seven decades linking anthropology and epidemiol-
ogy to patient care. How questions are constructed and relevant variables
dened is another pathway to collaboration. Although the categories of
person, place, and time now seem almost pedestrian in epidemiological
studies, this book gives them new life. Some of the more productive areas
for interdisciplinary study focus on how these categories overlap, such
P1: KcT
Conclusions about Dening Disciplines 173
as how aspects of person and place merge in studies of place-based net-
works, howperson and time coexist in research linking identity and health
status, and how place and time intersect in studies showing how context
inuences behavior and health. Human behavior is contingent. Context
inuences peoples activities, their health risks, and the outcomes of their
diseases.
Data collection itself is another fruitful area for joint projects between
anthropologists and epidemiologists. Looking at data collection as a pro-
cess of social exchange allows a novel kind of attention to be paid to the
inuence of society and culture on health. This inuence can be seen in
how measurement tools are developed and chosen as well as in the reac-
tions of participants to being measured. Research designs themselves are
becoming more complex and are beginning to connect disease processes
across molecular, physiological, familial, community, and socioeconomic
levels. Public health interventions at the level of communities are another
example of contemporary complex designs. They are doubly valuable
because they can at once show which behavior strategies can succeed,
and they can reveal how communities are put together. Complex designs
require contributions from many disciplines, but effective contributions
come fromknowing what other colleagues need as well as what they value.
A fundamental understanding of other disciplines research designs and
data collection methods is critical for successful collaboration.
Epidemiologists and anthropologists are exploring how to involve the
public in their collaborative projects and how to use their disciplinary
skills to address public concerns. These challenges offer many newoppor-
tunities for research and for new forms of communication. The presence
and importance of graphical and geographical representations of risk are
likely to continue to grow. But they will supplement rather than replace
the power of combining textual with numerical displays.
Cultural epidemiology forms an important parallel to social epi-
demiology. This book argues that epidemiology is a cultural practice,
although often it is unrecognized as such. Variables are dened and mea-
sured, results quantied, analyses disseminated, and policies developed,
all with specic cultural assumptions behindthem. Cultural epidemiology
reveals the ways in which measurement, causal thinking, and intervention
design are all inuenced by belief and habit in addition to deduction and
rational decision-making.
Cultural epidemiology also describes how group health patterns are
built out of what appear to be individual decisions. There are clear cul-
tural inuences on ideas as diverse as whether pills are more powerful
than injections, when and where a person should be allowed to smoke,
and how much physical activity a person should have in a day. These
P1: KcT
174 Conclusion
powerful ideas, labeled values, guide behavior that directly changes
human health. Summed across thousands of people, decisions like these
yield symptom proles, incidence rates, and case fatality rates.
But culture is not just a realmof ideas and personal decisions. It is also a
set of rankings of human classications like skin color or religion or caste,
which inuence the types of people or groups that have ready access
to resources. And it is a set of public decisions about how much money
should be invested in hospitals versus weapons, what kinds of health
problems constitute emergencies, and even what kinds of suffering and
complaints can be resolved. Questioning these decisions is the biggest
challenge in the study of epidemiology and culture.
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P1: KcT
198
P1: IWV
0521790506ind.xml CY477B/Trostle 0 521 79050 6 May 6, 2005 3:55
Index
Aboriginal Health Survey (Canada),
157158
abstraction, descriptive, 78
Ackerknecht, Irwin, 25
adaptation and migration, 44
advertising (see social marketing)
advocacy groups in pharmaceutical
research, 144
age, 43, 165166
AIDS (see HIV/AIDS)
American College of Epidemiology,
139
analysis, unit of, 146147
anthrax, 106, 170
anthropology, analysis in, 78
bias in, 8485
and borders, 6
of diarrheal diseases, 99, 103107
and disease metaphor, 118
of epidemics, 120
and epidemiology, 40, 62, 172
of epilepsy, 1214
and intervention design, 122123,
128129, 130, 136137, 139140,
141
in large-scale interventions, 140
medical geography and, 36
and migration, 4445
nonintervention in, 123124, 140
and outbreak investigations, 97
participant observation in, 76
patient access and, 90
population in, 136
of risk, 161, 162163, 167
statistics in, 40
and Stirling County study, 37
and study recruitment, 144145
and time, 68, 72
variation within, 6
anthropology, medical (see medical
anthropology)
Argentina, 52, 5455
ataques de nervios, 1720
authority of epidemiology, 160
auxiliary measurement theory, 4748, 72
awareness effect, 143
Bangladesh, 8687, 117, 141
behavior
Hippocrates and, 21
health-seeking, 7982, 99
individual versus population, 111112,
136137
and intervention design, 123, 127
patterns in, 78
preventive, 9697, 105106
and time, 71
of treatment and control groups, 143
Berkman, Lisa, 33
bias
and anthropology, 8485
dened, 79
and health-seeking behavior, 1415,
7980, 100
interviewer, 8990
nonresponse, 8384
and privacy, 84
publication, 94
recall, 8283, 9899
referral, 79
reporting, 89
selection, 15, 79
biomedicine, 3
and culture, 6263
and epilepsy, 1214
and seizures, 1920
Bourgois, Philippe, 124
Brazil, 7681
cholera in, 119
hypertension in, 45
intervention in, 141
ORS in, 141
breastfeeding, 129130, 131
Breilh, Jaime, 111112
199
P1: IWV
200 Index
Briggs, Charles and Mantini-Briggs, Clara
113114
Broad Street pump, 23
burden of disease, 16, 1920
Caesarean sections, 8182
Canada, 158
cancer, 26, 154, 155, 165
measurement of, 84
cardiovascular disease (see heart disease)
case-control study, nonparticipation and,
84
case fatality rate, 112113, 114
in African cholera, 120
variability in, 115116
Casper, Monica, 90
Cassel, John, at Pholela, 31
interest in culture, 3132, 44
at UNC School of Public Health, 3234
causality
and design, 92
in epidemiology, 171
in epilepsy, 1014
and intervention design, 123, 124125,
134
and person, 43
and place, 43
proximate and ultimate, 127
and time, 4344
Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC), 109, 147, 172
Chambers, Robert, 156157, 166
cholera
in Africa, 120
as colonial menace, 103
costs of, 116
impact of, 114, 117118
interventions for, 106, 111, 113114
John Snow on, 23
Latin American epidemic, 103, 116118
natural history of, 101102
multiple threats from, 103
in the United States, 105, 107
resistance to, 119, 121
suboptimal treatment of, 100117
sociocultural history of, 105106
and transcendence, 121
chronic disease, 9, 26
and community interventions, 124
circadian rhythms and health, 7071
circumcision, 9193
Civil Action, A, 46, 154
classication
of administrative boundaries, 46
in anthropology and epidemiology, 35
biomedical versus popular, 100
of cases, 61
of cholera fatalities, 113114
of diarrheal diseases, 98
of disease, 56, 35
of epidemics, 106
of ethnicity, 113
of interventions, 123, 133
of mortality, by nation-state, 42, 5156
by person, place, and time, 4244
of populations, 136
of race, 5660
of risk, 134, 150153, 164
of seizures, 914, 1920
of time, 6869
clinical trial, 93, 143145 (see also
randomized controlled trial [RCT])
cluster of disease, 4647, 154
cohort effects, 44
communication
by epidemiologists, 150, 162163, 164,
168
in intervention design, 137138
through maps, 154155
of risk, 151, 152153, 162, 165, 167
community
and awareness effect, 143
factionalism within, 158
participation by, 160161
psychiatric epidemiologists and, 37
interventions in, 136140, 141
sampling in, 15, 146147
community-controlled epidemiology (see
epidemiology, popular)
Community-Oriented Primary Care
(COPC), 2728, 3031
computer analysis, 39
condom promotion, 133
contagion
and cholera, 102, 117
and epilepsy, 12
Corbett, Kitty, 134
Cornell University, 36
cultural competency, 6263
cultural consonance in lifestyle, 4546
culture
adaptation to, 28, 30, 3132
and biology, 4344
and biomedicine, 6263
broker, 139140
as cause versus context, 61
and data collection, 74
dened, 5, 32, 174
and disease, 23, 96, 113114, 120
and disease patterns, 8, 10
epidemiologists need for, 5, 38,
148149
P1: IWV
Index 201
and illness causation, 31, 129
and intervention design, 3132,
111112, 132, 136137, 141
and mortality, 42, 4851
of organizations, 130
in randomized controlled trials,
143146
and risk perception, 165166
and statistics, 5556
and time, 4344, 6869, 7071
transformations of, 3
variability within, 3, 45, 62
culture change
disciplinary responses to, 3840
effects on health status, 33, 4346
and epidemic disease, 34
and psychiatric epidemiology, 38, 61
culture-bound syndromes (see distress,
idioms of)
death certicate, 5153, 60
denominators, 2223, 46
design
and auxiliary measurement theory,
4748
and causality, 171
dened, 93
experimental, 77
of multicenter trials, 147148
political versus ecological, 116
of randomized controlled trials (RCT),
142144, 145147
and recall, 99
and response rates, 8788
retrospective, 4
to study ataques, 19
diabetes, 26, 38
diagnosis
community health, 28
of epilepsy, 14
history of, 22
hospitals and, 22
interventions as, 139
national differences in, 2, 61
and technology, 23, 3940
diarrheal disease
causes, 98
classication, 98
environments and, 107108
epidemiology of, 98
measurement of, 9899
persistent, 99
treatment of, 99, 100
interventions on, 141
diet (see nutrition)
DiGiacomo, Susan, 90
Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY),
16
disciplines
bias in, 8485
boundaries between, 21, 168169,
172
collaboration across, 3, 67, 1920,
2122, 39, 148, 152153, 169,
172
impeding collaboration, 2122
labeling, 21
origins of anthropology and
epidemiology as, 6, 22
publication in, 95
response to change, 3840
disease
causation, 21, 25
chronic, 26
classication, 35
labels, 1214
as marker of culture change, 34
natural history of, 101102
patterns, 1, 4, 56, 8, 78
by person, place, and time, 4244
priorities, 16
public and private, 168
outbreaks, 96, 97
sociocultural history of, 105106
vector-borne, 63
display of risk, 155156
distress, idioms of, 1820, 33, 159160
Douglas, Mary, 134
dread and risk, 166, 168
Dressler, William, 4546
Durkheim, Emile, 25, 102
E. coli, 168, 169
Ebola virus, 96
ecology
anthropologists and, 3436
developing versus industrialized,
107108
medical, 35
and medical geography, 35
human changes to, 3839
of medical care, 7981
regional, 116
and social environment, 3536
ecological susceptibility, 107108
Ecuador
cholera in, 108, 111, 115, 116, 117
epilepsy in, 1014
education (see health education;
intervention, educational;
knowledge)
Eleven Blue Men, 170
P1: IWV
202 Index
environment
as focus for popular epidemiology,
153155
and mortality pattern, 51
and risk of cholera, 105106,
107108
environment, social, 26
ecological approaches to, 3436
and host resistance, 32
and individual risk, 4041, 109111
inuence on place, 43
interdisciplinary research and, 39
and mortality, 6465
epidemic
of cholera, 102
contact rates, 66
contemporary, 96, 97, 120
costs of, 116, 119
crises, 106, 119120
as drama, 106107
exclusion criteria and, 146147
as opportunity, 117118
of risk, 151
sociocultural causes of, 102
Virchow on, 25, 34, 119
epidemiologic polarization, 114115
epidemiology
analysis in, 4, 78
and anthropological theory, 38
bias, 1415, 8485
and borders, 6
challenges to, 160161
and COPC, 27
as culture, 7, 167
dened, 34, 42
of diarrheal diseases, 98, 100
of distress, 1820
of epilepsy, 9, 1415, 17
and feminism, 40
geographical, 36
image in media, 150, 160, 162164
and individual risk, 109111
interdisciplinary method, 30
and interest groups, 161
intervention design, 123, 127, 148149
interviewing in, 85
lay, 155157, 161, 163164
and medical anthropology, 67, 172
medical ecology, 3536
migration, 4445
of nervios, 1820
popular, 153155, 161
practice of, 4, 90
proof in, 171
and psychiatry, 61
qualitative methods in, 40
and social change, 30
of susto, 159160
and time, 7071
use of culture, 5
use of race, 5859
variation within, 6, 163164
epidemiology, cultural
of cholera, 120
examples, 56, 8, 40, 4546, 6668, 69,
173174
epidemiology of local knowledge (see
epidemiology, lay)
epidemiology, social
cultural change and, 38
dened, 5
early theorizing in, 32
and population attributes, 48
and social medicine, 34
at UNC Chapel Hill, 3334
epilepsy
causes of, 1014
dened, 9
diagnosis of, 14
epidemiology of, 9, 1415
history, 9
ranking, 16
selection bias in, 15
uncertainty in, 910
Ernster, Virginia, 48
ethics of clinical trials, 143144
ethnicity
uidity of, 5960, 113
and interviewing, 90
and risk perception, 165166
ethnography
and epidemiology, 6668, 7681
by Peter Panum, 24
response rates, 8788
of risk, 163
in Stirling County Study, 37
of study recruitment, 144145
and survey research, 8889
etiology, social
Durkheim on, 25
of epidemic disease, 102, 107108
of natural disaster, 97
in nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, 2526
Panum on, 24
at Pholela, 2728
at UNC Chapel Hill, 3234
and theory, 33
Virchow on, 25
Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 163
evidence-based medicine, 145, 170
P1: IWV
Index 203
exchange, social
among organizations, 90
interview as, 85, 8889
publication contract as, 94
Explanatory model, 82
Explanatory Model Interview Catalogue
(EMIC), 78
exposure, population, 135
migration and, 46
falling out, 1819
Falling Sickness, The, 9
Farmer, Paul, 129
feminism, epidemiology and, 40
fertility, 8889
eldwork
in anthropology, 23
and changing context, 39
counting deaths through, 77
in epidemiology, 2325
history of, 24
by John Snow, 2324
participant observation in, 76
by Peter Panum, 24
by Rudolf Virchow, 25
shoe-leather epidemiologist, 24
in Stirling County study, 37
Torres Straits, 24
World Fertility Survey and, 8889
Five-City Project, 137138
folk illness, epidemiology of, 33, 100,
159160
Frankel, Stephen, 155156
Frankenberg, Ronald, 134
Frenk, Julio, 114115
Galton, Francis, 47
Geertz, Clifford, 5, 32
Geiger, H. Jack, 30
gender, 50, 90
genetic versus racial variation, 5859,
6061
generalizability, 76, 77
geography, medical, 35, 36
Gluckman, Max, 28
Good, Byron, 61
graphical displays, 166
Great Britain, 54
group (see population)
Guide to Community Preventive Services,
147
Hahn, Robert, 5960
health
and hygiene, 24
mental, 3637
personal versus social, 163
resources for, 1214
and time, 7071
health care
alternative, 7980
and cholera, 117118
and epilepsy, 1014, 17
failure of, 114
formal, 79
healing traditions, 2
interventions in, 129130, 137, 141
time in, 71
health-seeking behavior
Caesarean section, 8182
and cholera, 112113, 117118
and diarrheal disease, 99
and epilepsy, 1214
and seizures, 19
and time, 71
heart disease, 26, 68, 146, 164
health education
for cholera, 111, 117
and randomized controlled trials,
170
at Pholela, 28
Health Interview Survey, U.S. National
(NHIS), 83
herd immunity, 65
Hispanic Health Council (Hartford),
138
HIV/AIDS, 6668, 106, 119
clinical trials, 144
interventions, 124, 133
Hornik, Robert, 127
Hughes, Charles, 37
humor in intervention design, 133
hygiene
measurement of, 8687
hypertension, 38, 4446
incidence, 100
and culture, 10, 1415
dened, 8
and menace, 165
inclusion criteria, 145146
India, 103, 119
inequality
and cholera, 105106, 115116
and illness, 4041, 45, 114115
and Titanic mortality, 4851
infant formula (see breastfeeding)
ination, 108
inuenza, 26
Institute for Community Research
(Hartford), 138
P1: IWV
204 Index
Institute of Family and Community Health
(IFCH) (South Africa)
closing, 29
emigration from, 29
founding, 26, 28, 2931
H. Jack Geiger at, 30
impact on other projects, 3031
and Navajo-Many Farms Project, 30
Norman Scotch at, 30
and Tufts-Delta Health Center, 30
Institute of Social Medicine (Oxford),
28
Institutional Review Board (IRB), 90,
143144
International Centre for Diarrhoeal
Disease Research, Bangladesh, 117
International Monetary Fund, 108
intervention, health
and authority, 142
causal theories, 123, 126, 141
for cholera, 106, 111, 113114
community-based, 137138,
146147
for condoms, 133
consumer boycott as, 131
dened, 122
educational, 125129
environmental, 131133
failures, 126127
legislative, 131
levels of, 124
and local knowledge, 126127, 138
managerial and administrative, 129130,
145146
in North Korelia, 137
at Pholela, 28
and place, 132
on populations, 135136
resistance to, 119
reinforcements among, 125, 133
intervention, structural
dened, 124
examples, 124125, 133, 134
interview
bias, 8990
recall, 82
and sensitive behavior, 8687, 8889
as social exchange, 85, 87
of study recruiters, 144145
Janes, Craig, 4344
Jenkins, David, 31
Johns Hopkins University, 36, 139
journalism, 168169
Justice, Judith, 130
Kark, Emily, 2728
Kark, Sydney, 2728
in Israel, 29
Kenya, epilepsy in, 1014
Kikwit handshake, 9697
knowledge
and communication, 168169
about communities, 139141
local, 126127, 148, 153155, 156
and statistics, 162
as weak incentive, 125126, 128129
Kunitz, Stephen, 119
kuru, 119
Legionnaires disease, 46
Leighton, Alexander and Dorothea, 36
Virchows pathology and, 37
lifestyle incongruity, 4546
literacy, 125, 167
Love in the Time of Cholera, 111, 118,
121
Lupton, Deborah, 163
malaria, 69
malnutrition, 32
maps
by John Snow, 23
participatory, 156157, 166167
of outbreaks, 154155
Mayo Clinic, 10
McKinlay, John, 111112
measles, 24
measurement
of case fatality rate, 112113, 115116
of circumcision status, 9193
and cultural convention, 7, 42, 74
of diarrhea, 9899
early tools of, 23
of education, 54
eyewitness, 91
fertility and, 8889
history of diagnosis, 22
incidence or prevalence, 1415, 22
of intervention effects, 136137
mental health and, 40
mortality and, 5556, 7677
of occupation, 54
and priority-setting, 16
of race, 52, 54, 5657, 5960
record keeping, 2223, 82
of sensitive behavior, 8687
of social status, 53
P1: IWV
Index 205
and standardization, 87, 141
of time, 6869, 72
medical anthropology
dened, 6
and epidemiology, 67, 21, 78
on race, 5859
medical care, 7980, 81
medication, 68, 128 (see also
pharmaceutical)
mental health
and epilepsy, 16
and distress, 1820
measurement of, 40
and seizures, 18
metaphor
cholera as, 103105, 118, 119, 121
empty vessel as, 126
and marketing, 128
production of, by epidemiologists, 164,
165
trafc as, 1
upstream as, 111112
Mexico, 19, 50, 55, 106, 159160
migration and disease labeling, 18
health effects of, 22, 38, 4344
military expenditures, 116
Ministers of Health, 106
modernization and disease, 4446
moral certainty, 171
mortality
from cholera, 113114
infant, 42, 60, 76
from heatwave, 97
and ORS, 99
and son preference, 2
and status, 5556
from Titanic sinking, 4851
from trafc accidents, 124125
Murphy, Jane, 61
nation-state
and epidemiology, 157158
and vital statistics, 51, 5556
National Health and Nutrition Exam
Survey, 59
National Institutes of Health (NIH), 146
Nations, Marilyn, 76, 119, 141
natural history of disease, 101102
Navajo-Many Farms Project, 30
neighorhood and health, 6465, 6668
Nepal, 8889
nervios, 1920
networks and disease transmission, 6566
nutrition, 63, 71, 135
observation
in anthropology, 78
in medical anthropology and
epidemiology, 21, 78
participant, 76
occupation, 54
Olmsted County, Minnesota, 10
ONeil, John, 157158
operationalization of variables, 4748
Oral Rehydration Solution (ORS),
99100, 102, 117, 141
outbreak investigation, 96
anthropological, 97, 121
pandemic, 103
Panum, Peter, 24
ethnography of, 24
on social causes of disease, 24, 25
Parker, Richard, 134
participation
anthropology of, 84, 140
in evaluation, 156157
in intervention design, 148
interviews, 85, 8788
in mapping, 154155
in studies, 39, 158
pathology
of cholera, 101
classication of, 97
Virchow on, 37
Patrick, Donald, 31
Paul, Benjamin, 122, 123, 136, 139
pellagra, 25
person, as epidemiologic category, 43,
48
Peru
cholera, 99, 100, 106, 108109, 115,
116
water boiling in, 126127
pharmaceutical industry and randomized
controlled trials, 144
Pholela Health Unit, 2628, 30,
3132
international impact of, 3031
intervention design at, 3132
and social medicine, 27
place
and disease causation, 43, 6365
and intervention, 132, 139140
placebo, 143
plague, 119
Polgar, Stephen, 126
polio, 106
political economy of health, 111112,
124125, 132133, 136, 140
P1: IWV
206 Index
population
attributes, 48
critique of, in anthropology, 136
efcacy of intervention on, 124,
135136, 137138
versus individual, 1, 6566, 129, 132,
136137, 152153, 162163, 165,
168
poverty
and sickness, 4041, 114115,
129
and epidemics, 106
and cholera, 109, 111112, 119
impeding prevention, 127
relative, 45
power
and change-agents, 32
of epidemiology, internationally,
163164
and health status, 4041
and interventions, 127128, 129, 130,
133, 137138, 142
of patients, 144
of randomized controlled trials, 143,
145, 148
and risk, 151, 162163
prayer and health, 47
prenatal testing, 161162
prescribing, 99100, 127128
prevalence, 100
dened 89
and culture 10, 1415
of nervios, 19
probability
and causation, 171
contingent versus independent,
6566
perceptions of, 134, 152
proxy reporters, 93
psychiatric dysfunction, 37
psychiatry, cross-cultural, 61
public
attitudes toward epidemiology, 150,
163164
health concerns of, 79, 96120, 152
involvement in epidemiology, 153155,
157, 161, 173, 174
and risk estimation, 46
public health
choleras threat to, 103
history of intervention in, 106, 111,
123124, 132
race in, 5657, 5859, 6061
publication
bias of, 94
limits on, 93, 95
pueblos j ovenes, 108
Puerto Ricans, 18, 19
race
measurement of, 5657, 5960
versus racism, 59
and social position, 52, 54
randomized controlled trial (RCT)
dened, 142143
limitations of, 146147
multicenter, 147148
sociocultural components in, 143145,
146147
Rapp, Rayna, 157, 161162
recall
among elderly, 83
maternal, 9899
and sensitive behavior, 87
record-keeping, 2223, 39
exposure, 82
by nation-state, 5153, 5455
privacy, 84
reexivity
dened, 7
epidemiologists and, 40
reliability
dened, 76
epidemiology and, 77
participant observation and, 76
religion, 43, 4748
researchers
biases among, 89
publishing by, 94
inuence on study enrollment,
144145
response rates, 8788, 158
risk
anthropology of, 161, 163
in cholera, 120
and choice, 163
and communication, 165
culture as, 6263, 139140
debates about, 160161, 162163
dened, 151152
as epidemic, 151
in hospitals, 129130
individual and social, 6566, 105106,
111112, 113114, 128129, 142,
166167
and intervention design, 123, 127, 134,
135
management of, 161
multifactorial, 171
P1: IWV
Index 207
perceived, 165166
pervasiveness of, 160
professional, 151
Rose, Geoffrey, 135136
Rou eche, Berton, 170171
Rubel, Arthur, 33, 159160
rules, social and cultural, 50
sampling, 146147
sanitation, 116
Sattenspiel, Lisa, 66
School of Public Health, University of
North Carolina, 3234
Scotch, Norman, 30
seizures, epileptic, 914
non-epileptic, 18, 1920
self-report, 9193
sensitivity, 92
Setel, Philip, 163
Singer, Merrill, 6668, 139, 140
Slovic, Paul, 151
smoking
disease causality in, 171
interventions on, 125, 131, 135
knowledge, 125126, 128
risk perception, 165166
Snow, John, 2324
On Cholera, 23
social class
as health determinant, 27, 32
measurement of, 54
on Titanic, 50
social exchange
data collection as, 173
interview as, 85, 87
research as, 144
social marketing
cholera, 111
in communities, 137138, 142,
162
heart disease, 164
smoking, 128
social medicine
in Latin America, 111
and Virchow, 25, 34
and Pholela, 27, 34
social organization
and disease transmission, 32
in interventions, 137138
in randomized controlled trials,
145146, 147148
revealed in outbreaks, 97, 106, 120
social support, 33, 4041
sociocultural history of disease, 102,
105106, 111112, 120
Sontag, Susan, 118
South African Health Service, 28, 29
specicity, 92
Stanton, Bonita, 8687
state
role of, in public health, 132
and vital statistics, 51, 52, 5556
statistics
in anthropology, 40
as communication, 162, 168169
cultural inuence on, 5556
key qualities of, 5960
and text, 169
unit of analysis in, 146147
Stein, Zena, 30
Stirling County Study, 37, 61
stratication
and disease, 4546
and mortality, 4851, 5556
and race, 55 (see also inequality; social
class)
Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome
(SARS), 46, 120
sugar salt solution (SSS), 141 (see also
ORS)
suicide, 25
survey research, 19, 87, 100
in Canada, 158
Susser, Mervyn, 29
susto, 33, 159160
symptoms, 98, 99
of cholera, 101
of epilepsy, 1014, 16
seizures as, 20
syphilis, 25, 32
Tanzania, 69
technology
interdisciplinary studies and, 3940
and publication, 94
randomized controlled trials as, 145146
and statistics, 7
Thailand, 133
Three Communities Study, 137
time
and cholera, 105
and disease causation, 4344, 68
and health-related beauty standards, 3
measuring, 4647, 72, 83
Timmermans, Stefan, 90
Titanic mortality, 4851
Torres Straits expedition, 24
trafc
mortality from, 7172
as population metaphor, 1
interventions to reduce fatalities from,
124, 131
P1: IWV
208 Index
transmission of disease, individual versus
sociopolitical, 109111
treatment, 100117, 144
tuberculosis, 25, 32, 66, 106, 119
Tufts-Delta Health Center, 30
Tuskegee study, 144
typhoid, 25
Uganda, 96
United States, 52, 54
disease terminology, 100
IFCH staff to, 29, 30
medical care in, 7981
neighborhood and health in, 6465
prescribing, 127128
seizure categories, 1920
smoking in, 125, 128, 131, 135
survey participation, 85, 8788
time and health in, 7071
vital statistics in, 52, 54, 5657
unpacking variables, 4748
urbanization, 22, 38
and disease transmission, 107, 108109
validity
bias and, 79
dened, 76
of diagnosis, 61, 92
and infant mortality, 77
of NHIS, 83
participant observation and, 76
of proxy reporters, 93
of race classication, 5960
recall and, 82, 9899
of World Fertility Survey, 8889
variability
in case fatality rates, 115116
in race classication, 5960
variable
processes underlying, 4244
reecting nation-state priorities, 5153
Venezuela, 113114
virulence, 103
vital statistics
in Argentina, 5455
in Brazil, 7677
categories of, and mortality patterns,
5156
origins of, 2223
in United States, 52, 54, 5657
Viravaidya, Mechai, 133
Virchow, Rudolf, 25
as anthropologist, 25
on epidemics, 119
inuence on Stirling County Study, 37
Wellin, Edward, 126127
White, Kerr, 7980
Wilkinson, Richard, 45
Winch, Peter, 69
worksite health and managerial
interventions, 130
World Fertility Survey, 8889
World Health Organization, 52, 99100,
117, 130

Epidemiology and Culture-James A. Trostle

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