Infectious disease surveillance in the United States and the United Kingdom: from public goods to the challenges of new technologies

Infectious diseases are a long-standing and continuing threat to health and welfare, with their containment dependent on national disease surveillance and response capacities. This article discusses infectious disease surveillance in the United States and the United Kingdom, examining historical national traditions for identifying and controlling infectious disease risks and how globalization and technical advances have influenced the evolution of their respective approaches. The two systems developed in different but parallel ways. In the United States, surveillance remained quite localized at the state level until the early twentieth century and still retains many of those features. The U.K. approach became centralized from the latter part of the nineteenth century and has principally remained so. In both cases, disease surveillance was traditionally conceived as a public good, where national or local authorities held sovereign rights and power to protect public health. With the increasing globalized nature of infectious disease, such notions shifted toward surveillance as a global public good, with countries responding in turn by creating new global health governance arrangements and regulations. However, the limitations of current surveillance systems and the strong hold of national interests place into question the provision of surveillance as a global public good. These issues are further highlighted with the introduction of new surveillance technologies, which offer opportunities for improved disease detection and identification but also create potential tensions between individual rights, corporate profit, equitable access to technology, and national and global public goods.     

The decline in sexual assaults in men's prisons in New South Wales: a "systems" approach

Male prison rape and sexual assaults remains a serious and sensitive issue in many countries. Human rights groups claim that sexual assaults among male prisoners have reached pandemic proportions and need to be stopped. Researchers for many years have studied the causes of male sexual assault in prison and offered numerous recommendations on its prevention. Few, however, have presented evidence for a decline in male prisoner sexual assaults and investigated the reasons for the decline. This article provides evidence from population-based surveys of a steady decrease in male prisoner sexual assaults in New South Wales (NSW) between 1996 and 2009. The authors conducted in-depth interviews with former and current inmates, and using a "systems" approach they discuss the complexity of sexual assaults in prison, incorporating a multiplicity of perspectives. In particular, they bring together different sources of data and discuss this in relation to changes in power structures and control in a modern prison, the attitudes of older and younger prisoners, the concept of "duty of care," introduction of prison drug programs, and prisoner attitudes toward gender and sexuality. In anthropology, the term "system" is used widely for describing sociocultural phenomena of a given society in a holistic manner without reducing the complexity of a given community.     

Editorial

Were the Carmelite order to submit argument based on what itssisters do today, the result in Gilmour v Coats [1949] AC 426would be reversed: but not its finding that the efficacy ofprayer is non-justiciable. Sacramental efficacy is in the same boat. The theologians holdthat the ministers of the sacrament of matrimony are the couplethemselves. In times when the imbalance between the relativesocial positions of the sexes was extreme, the additional requirementof a priestly witness helped protect the weak position in whichthe wife might have found herself