A patient consents to HIV genotyping because their physician needs the information to select treatment. The patient is never meaningfully informed that the viral sequence will also enter a government surveillance system. Their sequence is subsequently identified as part of a rapidly growing molecular cluster. Public-health officials then use that classification to decide where and how to intervene. The individual never consented to having their clinical specimen repurposed to map their relationship to a population-level transmission network. This creates a provocative comparison with conventional research ethics. If I recruited 5,000 people living with HIV into a university study, collected their viral sequences, linked those sequences to demographic and epidemiological information, constructed molecular clusters, and evaluated interventions based on those clusters, an IRB would scrutinize questions of consent, risk, privacy, data governance, and protection of participants. Yet when so...
Public Health: Epidemiology and Anthropology My intellectual position sits at a crossroads these scholars collectively helped create: HIV is no longer understood merely as a viral pathogen moving through populations, but as a socially produced condition embedded in desire, inequality, pharmacology, surveillance, migration, stigma, intimacy, and late-capitalist forms of embodiment. What distinguishes your focus is that you are not only examining risk, but also pleasure, agency, erotic culture, and the moral politics surrounding “raw sex” and chemsex among gay and queer communities. That shift matters. Paul Farmer and Philippe Bourgois would push you to ask what structural conditions produce chemsex environments in the first place. Rather than reducing condomless sex or stimulant use to “bad decisions,” their frameworks redirect analysis toward housing precarity, loneliness, labor alienation, minority stress, criminalization, biomedical inequality, and the psychic afterlife of th...