Sandy Smith-Nonini, PhD, assistant professor of anthropology, authored a chapter in a new book on social studies of infectious disease that came out with Johns Hopkins Press in July. The chapter, titled, “Cultural Politics of Institutional Responses to Resusrgent Tuberculosis Epidemics — New York City and Lima, Peru” is part of a book collection called “Emerging Illnesses and Society: Negotiating the Public Health Agenda,” edited by Randall Packard, Peter Brown, Ruth Berkelman & Howard Frumkin.
Smith-Nonini did the research for the study during a Mellon-Sawyer post-doctoral research project based at Emory University in 1999. The book was a project of Emory’s Center for the Study of Health, Culture & Society which devoted a 3-year period to the theme of emerging diseases and society. For her study, which compared responses to drug-resistant TB epidemics in two very different First World and Third World cities, Smith-Nonini travelled and conducted interviews with patients and public health experts in New York City, Lima, Peru, Boston (where Partners in Health has ties to a Lima-based health NGO), and Atlanta, headquarters of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.
See this Web site for more detail on the book.