In this paper, we explore the emergence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) as an object of political concern in and for countries of the global South. While epidemiologists and public health practitioners and scholars have long expressed concern with the changing global distribution of the burden of NCDs, it is only in more recent years that the aetiology, politics and consequences of these sh...

The birth of a language is a historical process, which develops through almost six stages corresponding to six main properties (genetic distance, geographical isolation, adoption of a writing system, elaboration of a literary koine, national consciousness, official status), which are specific to Western civilization and limited to our concern, i.e. the languages in contemporary Europe. The two ...

Why “social epidemiology”? Is not all epidemiology, after all, “social” epidemiology? In so far as people are simultaneously social and biological organisms, is any biological process ever expressed devoid of social context?—or any social process ever unmediated by the corporal reality of our profoundly generative and mortal bodies? 2 Yet, despite the seeming truism that social as well as biolo...

'Space and place are central to the strategies and meaning of protest’ (p. xi) reads the opening sentence of Katrina Navickas's latest study, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place 1789–1848. Written, in part, as a response to the 'spatial turn' in History, Navickas makes a cogent and persuasive argument for attending to the importance of the particularities of 'place' rather than the abst...

In this commentary, we review the growth of populist politics, associated with exploitation of what has been termed fake news. We explore how certain words have been used in similar contexts historically, in particular the term “enemy of the people,” especially with regard to public health. We then set out 6 principles for public health professionals faced with these situations. First, using th...

Sir.?The aims of your paper in regard to the public health, as set out in your New Year's issue, are excellent. And as everyone seems to be waking up at last to the fact that the housing question overshadows every other question in domestic politics, perhaps something will be accomplished. Questions of housing and health must not, however, be allowed to become the playthings of politics. Every ...

The importance of public policy as a determinant of health is routinely acknowledged, but there remains a continuing absence of mainstream debate about the ways in which the politics, power and ideology, which underpin public policy influence people's health. This paper explores the possible reasons behind the absence of a politics of health and demonstrates how explicit acknowledgement of the ...

The paper gives an overview of the different sentiment classification approaches and tools used for sentiment analysis. Starting from this overview the paper provides a classification of (i) approaches with respect to features/techniques and advantages/limitations and (ii) tools with respect to the different techniques used for sentiment analysis. Different application fields of application of ...

This paper explores the relationship between medicine and politics, between medical management of the human body and governmental management of the body politic. It argues that the increasing complexity both of society and of governmental administration of society in the modern age has made it impossible completely to separate medicine from politics. It demonstrates that, along with great poten...

politics is not the ghost in the machine of global health policy. conceptually, it makes little sense to argue otherwise, while history is replete with examples of individuals and movements engaging politically in global health policy. were one looking for ghosts, a more likely candidate would be democracy, which is currently under attack by a new global health technocracy. civil society moveme...