Merrill Charles Singer

• PhD
• Professor Emeritus at University of Connecticut

Adopting a critical anthropology of health perspective, informed by political ecology, we examine planetary health in the era of late capitalism or neoliberalism. The shift to a planetary health thinking was driven by the growing awareness that not only are all human communities now multiply linked together by flows of commodities, ideas, people, a...

Striving to understand what drives HIV infection and the covariates in which HIV is experienced was at the center of Merrill Singer’s conceptualization of syndemic theory 30 years ago. The idea of syndemic – or synergies of co‐occurring epidemics – was developed through ethnography around the social realities and structural drivers of HIV. The synd...

In this article, we address the nature of syndemics and whether, as some have asserted, these epidemiological phenomena are global configurations. Our argument that syndemics are not global rests on recognition that they are composed of social/environment contexts, disease clusters, demographics, and biologies that vary across locations. These poin...

In this review, we trace the origins and dissemination of syndemics, a concept developed within critical medical anthropology that rapidly diffused to other fields. The goal is to provide a review of the literature, with a focus on key debates. After a brief discussion of the nature and significance of syndemic theory and its applications, we trace...

Climate change is one of the gravest threats to human health in the twenty‐first century. This chapter first examines the historic and scientific understanding of the nature and primary features of climate change. This is followed by review of the multiple features of climate change that have significant health implications, including extreme weath...

Children born into and raised in disadvantaged families tend to experience poorer health and more developmental delays, lower achievement, and a greater number of behavioural and emotional problems than children from wealthier homes. There is growing evidence that poverty and social inequality leave their imprint on brain structure as well. The bra...

This paper examines the COVID-19 pandemic in light of two key concepts in medical anthropology: syndemics and structural violence. Following a discussion of the nature of these two concepts, the paper addresses the direct and associated literatures on the syndemic and structural violence features of the COVID pandemic, with a specific focus on: 1)...

In this commentary, I assess the adverse syndemic interactions between COVID-19 and diabetes mellitus. This syndemic is of major concern for a country like Mexico which has seen a steady rise in the percentage of its population suffering these diseases. Mexico now has one of the highest rates of diabetes in the world and a rapidly growing COVID-19...

While COVID-19 has become a global pandemic that has spread to all regions of the globe, local historic, health, and socio-environmental factors shape the epidemiological contours, response, and social challenges present within each affected nation. Thus, while countries like China, Italy, Iran, Brazil, and the United States have all been hard hit...

Purpose of review: The purpose of this review is to describe what methods were used for 60 articles on HIV syndemics in 2019, where they took place, what syndemic clusters emerged, and why this matters. Recent findings: Most articles published in 2019 used regression analyses, and fewer used higher level modeling techniques, frequencies and desc...

The applied anthropology of climate change seeks to bring the anthropological lens to the study of and social response to life on a warming planet. Recently, Practicing Anthropology published a special issue on Storying Climate Change! Here, we provide a critique of this set of papers from a political economic perspective based on the assertion tha...

As originally conceived, syndemics refers to complex epidemics involving two types of adverse interaction – the clustering and interactions of two or more diseases or health conditions (the biological–biological interface) and social environmental factors (the biological–social interface). The theory has been widely applied in the fields of medicin...

In this paper we examine the climate-driven anti-coal and anti-coal gas organizations and activist campaigns in Australia, a country that is a major force in global coal production and trade, and a growing coal seam gas producer and exporter. The sociopolitical context for our analysis is the close nexus that has existed historically between the co...

Despite calls for greater attention to the relationship between water access and disease, diarrhea and related malnutrition remains a leading cause of morbidity in children under 5 years. Children are especially vulnerable given their inability to mount an active immune response to pathogen exposure. Social conditions, including the long-term effec...

This environmental epidemiology article examines the understudied issue of Latino risk in the context of climate change. The largest ethnic minority group in the U.S., Latino socioeconomic characteristics put them disproportionately in harm’s way for the adverse health impacts of climate change, including being subject to diverse forms of discrimin...

The year 2016 was the hottest year on record and the third consecutive record-breaking year in planet temperatures. The following year was the hottest in a non-El Nino year. Of the seventeen hottest years ever recorded, sixteen have occurred since 2000, indicating the trend in climate change is toward an ever warmer Earth. However, climate change d...

As an applied social science, medical anthropology not only examines specific health issues in biosocial context but also seeks to build a broad, theoretically based understanding of what health is, how culture/society and health interact, the role of social relations in shaping disease, the importance of the health/environment interface, and a ran...

Syndemics are adversely interacting diseases and other health conditions that increase the illness burden of a population, commonly as a consequence of harmful social conditions that produce multiple disease clusters and vulnerable physical bodies. Rather than individual diseases being the primary drivers of poor health in populations, often it is...

How do we understand and respond to the pressing health problems of modern society? Conventional practice focuses on the assessment and clinical treatment of immediate health issues presented by individual patients. In contrast, social medicine advocates an equal focus on the assessment and social treatment of underlying social conditions, such as...

Central to this volume, and critical to its unique creative significance and contribution, is the conceptual unification of syndemics and stigma. Syndemics theory is increasingly recognized in social science and medicine as a crucial framework for examining and addressing pathways of interaction between biological and social aspects of chronic and...

In this article, we examine social responses to the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic in Cameroon, a country near to but beyond the farthest reaches of known Ebola cases. As Ebola spread in West Africa, there was mounting anxiety that the epidemic would spill over the border with Nigeria. To investigate people’s responses to Ebola-fear, we interviewed a sam...

Foundations of Biosocial Health Stigma and Illness Interactions EDITED BY SHIR LERMAN; BAYLA OSTRACH AND MERRILL SINGER - CONTRIBUTIONS BY NICHOLAS EMARD; THEODORE GIDEONSE; SEUNG YONG HAN; SHIR LERMAN; HARRISON M.K. MAITHYA; RUTHANNE MARCUS; GERALD MCKINLEY; BAYLA OSTRACH; MARY A. OTT; ELIZABETH J. PFEIFFER; MERRILL SINGER; ALEXANDRA BREWIS; SARAH...

In this article, we examine social responses to the 2014–2016 Ebola epidemic in Cameroon, a country near to but beyond the farthest reaches of known Ebola cases. As Ebola spread in West Africa, there was mounting anxiety that the epidemic would spill over the border with Nigeria. To investigate people's responses to Ebola-fear, we interviewed a sam...

The syndemics model of health focuses on the biosocial complex, which consists of interacting, co-present, or sequential diseases and the social and environmental factors that promote and enhance the negative effects of disease interaction. This emergent approach to health conception and clinical practice reconfigures conventional historical unders...

It is estimated that over a million people die each year from infectious diseases of zoonotic origin and hundreds of millions suffer from these pervasive threats to human well-being. In light of the emergent global concern over the Zika virus, evidence that it has not one but two competent mosquito vector species in the Aedes family, and that both...

In this article, we consider whether the term “medical anthropology” is serving us as well as it could be and whether the term “health anthropology” could be more appropriate. We argue that medical anthropology is used metonymically; that is, it is a part of the field that is used, inaccurately, to describe the whole. Anthropologists research, teac...

Global climate change is contributing to a range of adverse environmental and weather shifts, including more intense and more frequent heat waves and an intensification of the urban heat island effect. These changes are known to produce a set of significant and differentially distributed health problems, with a particularly high burden among poor a...

A Companion to the Anthropology of Environmental Health presents a collection of readings that utilize a medical anthropological approach to explore the interface of humans and the environment in the shaping of health and illness around the world. Features the latest ethnographic research from around the world related to the multiple impacts of the...

Emerging infectious diseases are a critical issue in contemporary global environmental health. The 2014/15 Ebola epidemic in West Africa has become the large most widespread outbreak of the disease to date, Among its various impacts, the epidemic triggered a proliferation of emergent ethnomedical cultural responses. With the appearance of cases in...

In this article, the authors provide a layered analysis of Ebola-chan, a visual cultural artifact of the 2014–2015 Ebola outbreak. Rather than considering her as a two-dimensional anime character (i.e. as a simple iconic coping mechanism and/or a fear response), this recent Internet meme is analyzed using an integrated semiotic and structural appro...

Using the ecobiopolitical model of critical medical anthropology, this chapter focuses on the structural origins and health effects of environmental racism, with specific focus on the role of governmental and corporate policies and actions in the polluting and environmental degradation of Native American reservations. We argue that the embedded str...

While ticks, and probably tick-borne infections, have been present throughout human history, their level of impact on human health has been growing in recent years as new tick-bone diseases (TBDs), new ranges for such diseases, and tick-borne disease-interactions have been identified. These changes are the consequence of several socioenvironmental...

This chapter is about the health implications of understanding the environment as a dynamic system, conceived as an array of interactive connections, and the health consequences of the impactful role of humans in modifying physical and biological connections in the Anthropocene. Notably, human release of greenhouse gases is now recognized as the pr...

Archaeologists face a long list of job-related health risks. In recent decades, these health threats have increased because of the expanded ranges of various tick species, the growing number of human tick-borne diseases, the ability of ticks to harbor and simultaneously transmit multiple pathogens, and the spread to humans of zoonotic tick-borne di...

An Experiment in Educating Congress about the Health Effects of War We often think of long­term health effects of war in terms of a legacy of suffering for combatants and people directly affected by battlefield events. Less attention is paid to the ways that war increases the burden of disease among broader populations. Little research focuses on h...

Individuals are not island isolates. This is an old insight that finds expression in indigenous worldviews, ancient philosophies, religious doctrine, and modern social theories. Even so, science remains encumbered by the false dichotomies and reductionism inherited from the capitalist revolution and reinforced by the fragmentation of modern life. T...

The objective of neoliberal globalization, as noted by various observers, is not the improvement of global health and wellbeing but the expansion of deregulated markets in international trade and investment, a characteristic affirmed and illustrated in this article through an examination of the global commoditization of turkey tails and the role of...

There is growing awareness of the health implications of fact that infectious agents often do not act independently; rather their disease potential is mediated in diverse and significant ways by their relationships with other pathogens. Pathogen-pathogen interaction (PPI), for example, impacts various virulence factors in human infection. Although...

[ab]Based on an assessment of the available research, this article uses syndemic theory to suggest the role of adverse bio–social interactions in increasing the total disease burden of tick-borne infections in local populations. Given the worldwide distribution of ticks, capacity for coinfection, the anthropogenic role in environmental changes that...

I believe that there is no dichotomy between the natural world and the human environment. As Herzog and Burghard accurately observe, “It would be difficult to overestimate the significance of animals in the social and psychological life [as well as the biology] of our species” (1988:214). It would be equally difficult to overestimate the impact of...

Background Hepatitis B virus (HBV) is a vaccine preventable infection yet vaccination rates are low among injection drug users (IDUs) despite the high risk of infection and longstanding recommendations to promote vaccination. We sought to improve vaccination rates by reaching IDUs through syringe exchange programs (SEPs) in three U.S. cities. Meth...

Diarrhoea remains the second leading cause of death in children under 5 years. Moreover, morbidity as a result of diarrhoea is high particularly in marginalised communities. Frequent bouts of diarrhoea have deleterious and irreversible effects on physical and cognitive development. Children are especially vulnerable given their inability to mount a...

In addressing the urgent questions raised by climate change, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the anthropology of climate change guided by a critical political ecological framework. It argues that anthropologists must significantly expand their focus on climate change and their contributions to responding to climate change as a grave...