The smell arrived in the middle of our interview. I was sitting in the trade union’s local center in Aliağa, on İzmir’s northern edge, three days into a preliminary study of industrial pollution and health. İbrahim is a retired petrochemical operator, a two-term union branch chair, and now an opposition member of the municipal council. […]
Mwanga is a 27 year-old pharmaceutical technician and was one of my closest associates during my 11-month stay in Morogoro Town, Tanzania, for fieldwork. After Mwanga graduated from St Francis University College of Health and Allied Sciences, with an Ordinary Diploma in Pharmaceutical Sciences, she obtained a job at a drug shop, locally known as […]
In many parts of the world, there is an increasing discomfort with middlemen in the healthcare industry (Pearl, 2024). They are characterized as greedy, profit seekers and vilified characters that put money before health and proliferate the markets with fake medicines, putting public health in danger (Kaprove R and M.D 2014, Rowland D 2021, Edema […]
In one of the oldest streets in Tehran’s city centre, an informal pharmaceutical marketplace unfolds amidst a crowded street, where ‘dalals’[1] (brokers) stand on the pavements, hands brimming with packages of pharmaceuticals, whispering various medication names to pedestrians. Here Maryam, seeking Bisoprolol for her mother’s heart condition, engages in conversation with Davood, a dalal in […]
This is the story of how the World Health Organisation (WHO) came to partner with Interpol and the pharmaceutical industry to fight a war against fake drugs. This partnership took the form of a taskforce, the International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeit Taskforce (IMPACT), which contributed greatly to how counterfeit drugs became understood as a threat to […]
Introduction I’m walking through Mwenge, one of Dar es Salaam’s central business districts. I’ve been spending time here with Hassan, a petty cosmetics trader, who carries his goods in a suitcase as he makes his daily tour of the market. We’ve been walking a while and Hassan suggests that we stop by at his favourite […]
It’s a Ramadhan morning in the port city of Mombasa, early April 2023. I’m standing behind an audience of about 100 people who have turned up to a makeshift stage on the edge of the neighbourhood of Old Town. A performance of Lisemwalo Lipo: A play about vaccine rumours is in full swing.
Why should the figure of the middleman matter for scholars of global health? The short answer is: they are impossible to avoid. The long answer is as follows: Throughout the twenty-first century, claims have circulated that the global pharmaceutical supply chain is awash with fakes, and these claims sparked our curiosity. For nearly a decade, […]
A workshop report of Symbiotic Viruses, convened by Benjamin Hegarty and Frédéric Keck, and held at the Collège de France and Paris Institute for Advanced Study, 4-5 March 2025 1. The virology of history The idea that viruses might be addressed as potential allies in human health is a tantalising yet troubling prospect. In the aftermath […]
1. Biopolitical Fieldwork By the end of 2023, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 public health emergency to be over. With this announcement came the realisation that, despite an abundance of publications, online debates, and solitary reflection, it remained difficult to know how to think about what we had lived through – or even […]
Since 2020, the category of “essential work,” and the exploitative conditions it legitimized during the COVID-19 pandemic, has sparked waves of labor protest across the globe. Feminist scholars saw the global emergence of the category of “essential work” as holding emancipatory potential, as it publicly affirmed the value of reproductive labor (Stevano and and Jamieson […]
