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Purpose – To provide an overview of racial/ethnic disparities in human papillomavirus (HPV) infection, HPV vaccination, and cervical cancer on domestic and international levels.

Design/methodology/approach – The literature, cervical cancer prevention guidelines, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention resources were culled to aggregate information on epidemiology, racial/ethnic disparities, and knowledge and attitudes related to HPV, HPV vaccination, and cervical cancer. Original data supplement information about HPV and HPV vaccination knowledge and attitudes.

Findings – Cervical cancer is among the leading causes of female death worldwide, with substantial racial/ethnic and geographic disparities. In the United States, African American and Hispanic women suffer disproportionate cervical cancer incidence and mortality compared to their Caucasian counterparts. Globally, the greatest burden of cervical cancer (and HPV infection) is shouldered by developing regions. Prevention efforts, such as HPV vaccination and adaption of screening programs to resource-poor areas, have the potential to reduce such disparities, but cultural context is critical to successful development and implementation of such interventions.

Research limitations/implications – As this is not a systematic review, but rather a viewpoint on issues related to disparities in cervical cancer, the literature review is not exhaustive.

Practical implications – This chapter provides a context for examining cervical cancer disparities domestically and globally and serves as a starting point for formulating future research.

Originality – This perspective on HPV and cervical cancer presents disparities both within the United States and worldwide. The chapter supplements the literature with new data that provide additional insight into knowledge and attitudes about these health issues.

Online social networks are increasingly important venues for businesses to promote their products and image. However, information propagation in online social networks is significantly more complicated compared to traditional transmission media such as newspaper, radio, and television. In this chapter, we will discuss research on modeling and forecasting diffusion of virally marketed content in social networks. Important aspects include the content and its presentation, the network topology, and transmission dynamics. Theoretical models, algorithms, and case studies of viral marketing will be explored.

This study aims to better understand the key factors that affect the quality of care that patients with Hepatitis C are likely to receive in rural communities and to consider how to build a more effective health support system for the rural residents.

This qualitative study with a grounded theory approach allowed us to draw a conceptual map of the occurrence while informants had the opportunity to contemplate and share their thoughts on the issues, which led into new understandings of the subject matter.

The local leaders held a romanticized view toward rural life while the disadvantaged reported a sense of powerlessness to bring about the needed changes to help them battle Hepatitis C.

Although describing a single social setting provides in-depth description, generalizability to other settings is always a limitation. If one wishes to start a support group, he/she may have to start asking the clergy of different churches to be the cofounders of the support group organization.

Churches may have the most potential to bring about the needed changes in rural settings by fostering a supportive heath care environment in their communities.

Purpose – This chapter considers the social politics of H5N1 (“avian influenza”), the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, and the response to it within the context of the history of pandemic influenzas and the continuing need for robust preventative public health systems more generally. In particular, the author considers how the borders between nations, species, and individuals are thrown into relief and called into question by influenza outbreaks and their management.

Methodology/approach – This work relies on literature review, media research, and critical and interpretative sociological methods.

Findings – While panic surrounding new and potentially highly virulent influenza strains is reasonable, such panic is not sustainable and belies the fact that every year presents the danger of a pandemic. This chapter argues that, if public health systems only respond to immediate panic and fail to consider how quickly airborne diseases can cross all sorts of borders, they do not attend to the real need for far-seeing, long-term, internationally collaborative disease prevention and disaster preparedness.

Contribution to the field – The author offers a critical and wellness- and prevention-oriented perspective on what priorities should be emphasized in the rapidly growing fields of disaster studies and disaster preparedness, which, by their nature, tend to be crisis oriented and focused on the micro-term, with planning done on a case-by-case basis. Such a narrow focus can render preventative health systems inflexible and unable to rise to the challenge of a disease that can spread easily through casual contact.

This chapter reviews factors responsible for climate change, impacts of the change on animal health, zoonotic diseases, and their linkage with One-Health program.

This chapter is based on the available literature related to climate change and its effect on animal health and production from different points. The causes and change forcers of climate change, direct and indirect effects of the change on animal health management, host–pathogen–vector interaction, and zoonotic diseases are included. Inter-linkage between climate change and One-Health program are also assessed.

Beside natural causes of climatic change, greenhouse gases are increasing due to human activities, causing global climate changes which have direct and indirect animal health and production performance impacts. The direct impacts are increased ambient temperature, floods, and droughts, while the indirect are reduced availability of water and food. The change and effect also promote diseases spread, increase survival and availability of the pathogen and its intermediate vector host, responsible for distribution and prevalence of tremendous zoonotic, infectious, and vector-borne diseases. The adverse effect on the biodiversity, distribution of animals and micro flora, genetic makeup of microbials which may lead to emerging and re-emerging disease and their outbreaks make the strong linkage between climate change and One-Health.

Global climate change is receiving increasing international attention where international organizations are increasing their focus on tackling the health impacts. Thus, there is a need for parallel mitigation of climate change and animal diseases in a global form.

Most research on climate change is limited to environmental protection, however this chapter provides a nexus between climate change, animal health, livestock production, and the One-Health program for better livelihood.

Purpose – The authors examine framing and narrativization in news coverage of health threats to assess variations in news discourse for known, emerging and novel health risks. Methodology/Approach – Using the analytical categories of known, emerging, and novel risks the authors discuss media analyses of anti-vaccination, antimicrobial resistance (AMR), and Covid-19. Findings – Known risks are framed within a biomedical discourse in which scientific evidence underpins public health guidelines, and following these directives prevent risk exposure while non-compliance is characterized as immoral and risky. News coverage of emerging risks highlights public health guidelines but fails to convey their importance as the risks seem too distant or abstract. Media coverage of novel risks is characterized by the ubiquity of uncertainty, which emerges as a “master frame” under which all incidents and events are subsumed. Stories about novel risks highlight the fluid and changing nature of scientific knowledge, which has the unintended effect of fueling uncertainty as studies and experts contradict each other. Originality/Value – This chapter introduces a new analytical framework for examining how media stories represent public health risks, along with previously unpublished analysis of media coverage about AMR and Covid-19. This chapter provides insight about the nature of risk discourses involving media, public health officials, activists, and citizens.

This chapter explores theory and local context of socially constructed pandemic fears during COVID-19; how material and non-material fear objects are construed, interpreted and understood by communities, and how fears disrupt social norms and influence pandemic behavioural responses. We aimed to understand the lived experiences of pandemic-induced fears in socioculturally diverse communities in eastern Indonesia in the context of onto-epistemological disjunctures between biomedically derived public health interventions, local world views and causal-remedial explanations for the crisis. Ethnographic research conducted among several communities in East Nusa Tenggara province in Indonesia provided the data and analyses presented in this chapter, delineating the extent to which fear played a decisive role in both internal, felt experience and social relations. Results illustrate how fear emotions are constructed and acted upon during times of crisis, arising from misinformation, rumour, socioreligious influence, long-standing tradition and community understandings of modernity, power and biomedicine. The chapter outlines several sociological theories on fear and emotion and interrogates a post-pandemic future.

This chapter considers how social capital is evolving in the era of globalization today especially under COVID-19 pandemic conditions globally. Definitions of social capital have varied: some broad others narrow. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), for example, currently has a broad research project on social capital. These researchers have defined social capital as comprising four key areas. These areas are:

• Personal relationships, referring to the structure of people’s social networks.

• Depth and breadth of social network support available to each person in their networks.

• Civic engagement activities such as volunteering and community action.

• Beliefs, attitudes, and action frames of reference such as trust and cooperative norms, of reciprocity.

Personal relationships, referring to the structure of people’s social networks.

Depth and breadth of social network support available to each person in their networks.

Civic engagement activities such as volunteering and community action.

Beliefs, attitudes, and action frames of reference such as trust and cooperative norms, of reciprocity.

Thus, there are tacit as well as explicit aspects of social capital though some of these may seldom if ever be articulated and delineated for others.

As Claridge (2020) indicates, there are distinct, but dynamically interrelated, levels of social capital. These levels range between the micro- or individual level. That is personal “habitus” – which Bourdieu (1977) describes as a person’s “taken-for-granted” – ways of being, thinking, and reacting to events and to other people. Then, the next level above the individual is the meso-level, which is “how things are done here amongst us,” that is, the level of a group’s social capital (such as a team, or an organizational or local community level). Lastly, and wider still, the top level is the macro- or cultural-societal structural level of the nation.

The social capital systems in any location encompasses sets of acceptable or culturally legitimated behavioral norms and rules of engagement between community members which include types of greetings, forms of cooperation, communications, and signaling between diverse members. Thus, social capital may be present in the tacit, or unspoken/taken-for-granted assumptions as much as in explicit or formalized codes of behavior. The forms of social interactions at each of the levels may have norms for specific types communication and address in particular sets of circumstances such as social gatherings at home or in public or when attending communal gatherings or ceremonial occasions, or between people of different social status. Social capital generates trust and social cohesion and some level of cultural and attitudinal consensus and interest, which in turn delivers a stable environment for the local community or larger society, business, or the economy.

• (1)

  Social capital is the development of relationships that help contribute to a more efficient production of goods and services as there is embedded trust, embodied in practice, that is, in behaviors regarded as trustworthy and socially helpful.

• (2)

  There are three types of social capital at each level of interaction – bonding, bridging, and linking. Bridging and linking are similar though they operate in different directions socially. Bonding social capital describes the connections between people in similar social levels or groups of people who share the same characteristic norms and beliefs, whereas linking social capital facilitates connects between different groups.

• (3)

  Social capital can therefore make or break businesses, especially small businesses or start-ups as those with the right kind and amount of social capital, such as good connections and contacts in the trade or profession, can usually thrive as they are able to get work done more quickly, effectively, and efficiently. Conversely, a lack of social capital denoting some distrust between groups can undermine social stability.

Social capital is the development of relationships that help contribute to a more efficient production of goods and services as there is embedded trust, embodied in practice, that is, in behaviors regarded as trustworthy and socially helpful.

There are three types of social capital at each level of interaction – bonding, bridging, and linking. Bridging and linking are similar though they operate in different directions socially. Bonding social capital describes the connections between people in similar social levels or groups of people who share the same characteristic norms and beliefs, whereas linking social capital facilitates connects between different groups.

Social capital can therefore make or break businesses, especially small businesses or start-ups as those with the right kind and amount of social capital, such as good connections and contacts in the trade or profession, can usually thrive as they are able to get work done more quickly, effectively, and efficiently. Conversely, a lack of social capital denoting some distrust between groups can undermine social stability.

The meso- or macro-levels of bridging type social capital ensures acceptance of established social roles locally and linking forms of social capital boost levels of acceptance of other roles such as those of leaders and followers.

All three forms of social capital and the three levels are not mutually exclusive but instead are mutually inclusive and interrelated. That is, they co-evolve, each impacting the other while dynamically interacting with the social capital anchored as it is emerging from the complex and interwoven fields of tacit and explicit norms of social interaction underpinning each of the levels of interaction over time.