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Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is highly prevalent in the United States, yet is largely culturally invisible. This study examines what people know about their illness, both before and after diagnosis, and the relationship to race. The data are from in-depth interviews in 2004 with 53 persons, mostly white or African American, with HCV in the southeastern United States. The respondents have varying educational backgrounds, family incomes, and possible modes of transmission of HCV. Regardless of whether the diagnosis of HCV came as a surprise, respondents had a range of reactions including fear, shock, sadness, and ambivalence. Knowledge of the disease postdiagnosis varies as some people have expert knowledge, moderate knowledge, or inaccurate to no knowledge of the disease. Minority respondents have less knowledge of HCV than whites. This racial disparity in knowledge has profound implications for people with HCV and the larger society.

Through the example of a “regulatory ranking” – an index produced with the aim to regulate the pharmaceutical market by pushing companies in the direction of providing greater access to medicine in developing countries – this chapter focuses on indexing and ranking as infrastructural processes which inscribe global problem spaces as unfolding actionable territories for market intervention. It foregrounds the “Indexal thinking” which structures and informs regulatory rankings – their aspiration to align the interests of different stakeholders and to entice competition among the ranked companies. The authors detail the infrastructural work through which such ambitions are enacted, detailing processes of infrastructural layering/collage and patchwork through which analysts naturalize/denaturalize various contested categories in the ranking’s territory. They reflect on the consequences of such attempts at reconfiguring global topologies for the problems these governance initiatives seek to address.

This review integrates and builds linkages among existing theoretical and empirical literature from across disciplines to further broaden our understanding of the relationship between inequality, imprisonment, and health for black men. The review examines the health impact of prisons through an ecological theoretical perspective to understand how factors at multiple levels of the social ecology interact with prisons to potentially contribute to deleterious health effects and the exacerbation of race/ethnic health disparities.

This review finds that there are documented health disparities between inmates and non-inmates, but the casual mechanisms explaining this relationship are not well-understood. Prisons may interact with other societal systems – such as the family (microsystem), education, and healthcare systems (meso/exosystems), and systems of racial oppression (macrosystem) – to influence individual and population health.

The review also finds that research needs to move the discussion of the race effects in health and crime/justice disparities beyond the mere documentation of such differences toward a better understanding of their causes and effects at the level of individuals, communities, and other social ecologies.

This study investigates the relationship between being formerly incarcerated and the sexual health of African American and White men. It uses data from the 2011–2013 National Survey of Family Growth to compare the likelihoods of reporting sexually transmitted disease among African American and White men who were formerly incarcerated with those who were never incarcerated. The results show that having been incarcerated increases the likelihood of having sexually transmitted infections (STIs) for both African American men and White men. The results also reveal that, when controlling for sociodemographic and sexual network differences, White men maintain lower infection rates than do comparable African American men regardless of their former incarceration statuses. When several factors are taken into account, the likelihood of infections for African American men who have never been incarcerated are higher than those of White men who have been incarcerated. Racial disadvantage is a key determinant of disparities in STIs between formerly incarcerated White males and never incarcerated African American males. The implications of these results are discussed.

Introduction. This study examined the association between self-rated physical and oral health, cigarette smoking, and history of criminal justice contact (i.e., never arrested; arrested, but never incarcerated; or incarcerated in reform school, detention, jail, or prison) among African American men and women. Methods. We conducted descriptive statistical, linear regression, and multinomial regression analyses of the African American subsample (n = 3,570) from the National Survey of American Life (2001–2003). Results. Overall, African American women reported lower arrest rates and histories of incarceration than African American men. Additionally, we found that criminal justice contact was associated with lower self-rated physical health and oral health and higher levels of smoking for both men and women. African American women who had been arrested and detained in facilities other than jail had more chronic health problems than their male counterparts. Furthermore, having been arrested or spent time in a reform school, detention center, jail, or prison significantly increased the odds of African American men being a current smoker. Lastly, among African American women, those who had any level of criminal justice contact were likely to be current smokers and former smokers compared to those without a history of criminal justice contact. Conclusion. Addressing the health of African Americans with criminal justice contact is a critical step in reducing health disparities and improving the overall health and well-being of African American men and women. Furthermore, attention to differences by gender and specific types of criminal justice contact are important for a more precise understanding of these relationships.

This chapter will identify readily accessible existing sources of public data. Thechallenges of using that data are considerable and require extensive time to ensure validity for reporting purposes. Summaries of data field selection and data wrangling requirements are presented in conjunction with data aggregation strategies.

In recent years there have been increasing calls for the use of anabolic androgenic steroids (AAS) and associated drugs to be recognized as a public health issue. In the domain of the competitive athlete and professional bodybuilder, recent decades have seen the diffusion of AAS from the hardcore gyms of the 1980s and 1990s to the mainstream exercise and fitness environments of the twenty-first century. Alongside the apparent increases in the use of these drugs, there is a growing evidence base in relation to harms – physical, psychological and (to some extent) social. But is this form of drug use a public health issue? What criteria should we use to make this judgement? What is the available evidence and has our understanding of the issue improved? By drawing on the authors' research in the United Kingdom and the wider international literature this chapter will explore these issues and attempt to answer the fundamental question – is the use of anabolic steroids a public health issue?

This paper analyzes the market for registered nurses in the U.S. during the period from 1978 to 1995, but is specifically concerned with how the prospect of treating patients with HIV or AIDS may have affected the supply of entrants into nursing. Using cross-sectional time-series data, we find that concern about the risk of contracting AIDS reduced admissions to nursing schools by as much as 15%. In states with a higher incidence of AIDS, such as New York, we find a much larger effect. Since the deterrent effect of AIDS was not limited to those considering whether to enter nursing school, our estimates represent a lower bound on the reduction in supply. However, we also find that the deterrent effect declined over time, as it became clear that the disease could not be transmitted by casual contact.

Our findings suggest that substantial welfare costs are imposed by regulations that require all nurses to treat patients with HIV or AIDS.

Chronic illnesses require long term, ongoing medical care as well as the provision of a variety of social support services. These diverse systems of care need to be integrated. However, under managed care, health care systems adhere to a disease model where emphasis is placed upon cure rather than care. While managed care can increase system coordination, the logic of cost containment favors acute services over the long term supportive services needed by chronic care clients. In this paper I describe efforts in one community which has received funding to integrate services for individuals with chronic mental illness as well as a planning grant to integrate multiple chronic care systems (HIV, mental health, and substance abuse) for minority clients. I describe various models of system integration and how diverse systems can be coordinated. In the conclusion I examine the barriers to system integration and argue that sociologists need to play a stronger role in understanding systems of care.

Much of the discussion surrounding the antivaccine movement focuses on the decision of parents to not vaccinate their children and the resulting danger posed to others. However, the primary risk is borne by the child left unvaccinated. Although living in a developed country with high vaccination rates provides a certain amount of protection through population immunity, the unvaccinated child is still exposed to a considerably greater risk of preventable diseases than one who is vaccinated. I explore the tension between parental choice and the child’s right to be free of preventable diseases. The chapter’s goal is twofold: to advocate for moving from a dyadic framework – considering the interests of the parents against those of the state – to a triadic one, in which the interests of the child are given as much weight as those of the parent and the state; and to discuss which protections are available, and how they can be improved. Specific legal tools available to protect that child are examined, including tort liability of the parents to the child, whether and to what degree criminal law has a role, under what circumstances parental choice should be overridden, and the role of school immunization requirements in protecting the individual child.