Category: Health

  • On Monday I took a two-day business trip to Minami Soma City, in the disaster-affected area of East Japan. Minami-soma city was hit by the tsunami, and although there does not seem to be much online footage of Minami Soma City’s experience, the effect on nearby Soma City (just north of Minami Soma) can be…

  • Continuing my series of posts on sex work, public health and feminism, I turn my attention now to the modern feminist response to sex work. First I’ll outline a common strand in modern feminist responses to sex work and pornography, which I think it should be pretty obvious contrast with the public health approach I…

  • Continuing my series of posts on sex work, public health and radical feminism, this post will attempt to describe the public health issues surrounding modern sex work, and some common public health responses to it. For the most part I will be talking about developed nations; for a variety of reasons, different conditions pertain in…

  • I stumbled on an article in the New England Journal of Medicine this morning that discusses the “broccoli defense” against plans to make purchasing of health insurance mandatory in the USA. I think the article is behind a paywall so there’s no point in offering a link, but anyway it’s fundamentally pretty uninteresting. However, it…

  • Continuing my series of posts on sex work and public health, I thought I might take a brief look at some of the historical debate over sex work and public health. Sex work can be a major risk factor for the transmission of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and the sex industry can play the role…

  • This is the first of a series of posts I hope to write over the next few weeks. For the last few months I’ve been working with a PhD student on a cost-effectiveness evaluation of behavioral interventions to reduce HIV transmission among sex workers, and in many ways this has drawn on a lot of…

  • … in Japanese, for my work. Yesterday a group of 40 first year high school students came to my department from Soma City, a town in the tsunami-affected region of Tohoku. I’m not sure why, perhaps as a quid pro quo for research we’re doing up there, but they were brought down for the afternoon…

  • Now the world’s population has reached 7 billion, there is some talk of the consequences for the planet, and as always happens at this time attention has turned to Japan’s ageing population. This is usually seen as a bad thing for Japan, with various predictions of population crash and economic catastrophe for the world’s second…

  • In looking at the cost-effectiveness of health interventions in fantasy communities we have shown that the infinite lifespan of elves creates analytical problems, and other commenters have suggested that the cost-effectiveness of clerical interventions to reduce infant mortality should be balanced against the need for clerics to go to war. Well, Professor John Quiggin at…

  • Today I am celebrating my first publication in my new job, and since it’s about a topic I’ll probably be coming back to a lot in the next year, I thought I’d cover it here. It’s not much of a publication – just a letter in the journal Addiction – but it covers what I…